Guest: Andreas Welsch (LinkedIn)
Company: SAP (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk @ SAP Sapphire Orlando 2023

Artificial intelligence is central to SAP’s strategy. It is built into its business applications, whether it’s ERP (S/4HANA), HR (SuccessFactors) or procurement (Ariba) to help customers become more efficient and effective. In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk recorded at the 2023 SAP Sapphire Conference in Orlando, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with Andreas Welsch, VP and Head of Marketing & Solutions – Artificial Intelligence at SAP, to talk about the many AI capabilities that the company is rolling out to its customers.

Highlights of this video interview:

• SAP AI Business offers tremendous opportunities for companies to enhance their business processes and gain better insights and better outcomes. It combines SAP’s deep industry expertise and knowledge with the data in the business systems of its customers.
• SAP also announced 15 new AI capabilities across its entire business application portfolio. A large number of them are based on generative AI. For example, for its Signavio suite, SAP is integrating large language models to help process owners and analysts create new processes and identify the right KPIs for them very quickly.
• SAP Concur facilitates submission of travel expenses. It allows you to scan receipts with your mobile phone and when you upload them to the app, AI extracts the information from those receipts and pre-populates your travel expense report.
• Some of the companies that SAP serves have been around for a very long time and are in their early stage of digital transformation and cloud adoption. With these built-in AI technologies, they can get onboard and move forward quickly.
• Success story: The Swiss railway company is using AI from SAP in their accounts receivable management process. It automated up to 99% of their process, which is about a million payments a year that they no longer need to assign manually – huge savings on time.
• In the area of transportation management, SAP is combining its document processing capabilities with large language models to help our customers extract information from documents like goods receipts and delivery notes very quickly without the need to have training data, which is usually very expensive and cumbersome to obtain.
• For HR, SAP, in partnership with Microsoft, will be using OpenAI GPT services through Azure and combining them with SAP SuccessFactors recruiting. By leveraging the GPT technology with the deep data and knowledge that is already in SuccessFactors, it can generate very specific and tailored job descriptions.
• SAP CX provides a natural language processing capability embedded into the applications that its customers use every day to help them schedule vacations, get information about their purchase orders, and many more.
• In 2018, SAP was one of the first companies to define its guiding principles for artificial intelligence. Since then, it developed a binding AI ethics policy – binding in the sense that it applies to all SAP employees in how they work with AI technology and how they build AI embedded systems. Responsible AI is at the core of what they do. The same principles govern how they approach generative AI.

This summary was written by Camille Gregory.