SAP S/4HANA Cloud Fueled by Artificial Intelligence - DT105v
Hi and welcome to our session. It's great to see so many participants here. Um, maybe first of all, a short round of introductions. So I'm Alessandra, I'm a senior data scientist, and I work in the AI incubation team in cloud ERP. And we are a central team and we are supporting our product teams when they want to integrate machine learning into their products. And my name is Olga Cherepanova. Warm welcome from my side.
Happy to have you here. And Alessandra. Yes. Before we start, just a reminder, we have our Q&A tool here for those who are in the live session, so please feel free to post any questions you might have during the session already in the tool.
And we have our experts, Raghu and Carsten, who will happily also answer during the session. And thanks Raghu and Carsten for supporting. All right, so our session is about SAP s four Hana Cloud fueled by artificial intelligence. Or in short, what's what's up with artificial intelligence in S four? And you might ask yourself, why is SAP doing AI at all? And of course, you've all heard about this big AI hype currently, right? The AI is it's really everywhere. And you might think, okay, we have to do something.
But the truth is, actually, SAP has been innovating in the area of artificial intelligence already for years, and we are going also to show you that in a few minutes. So we already have innovations shipped and and is already accessible and can be used. And the idea for SAP is really to to support our customers to, to make the daily life the daily work. When you interact with our systems more efficient, easier, and of course also more fun. And yeah, with that I would say I will, I will start and maybe just to start at a at a slightly higher level.
So what is the SAP strategy on artificial intelligence. And this you can can see here on the slides. So you can see we have our four cloud products here cloud ERP human capital management spend Management and business network. And of course also customer relation management. And when we want to infuse AI into our portfolio, we are not only talking into infusing it into our separate products, but of course also into the business process in specific.
And you can see the business processes is spanning across all the products here. And this is independent of the underlying technology. This can be of course document processing, recommendations, forecasting, whatever you name it. But the idea is really integrate AI into the business process and span across the products. And the basis for all of this is, of course, our business data, which is also spanning across the products. One important thing to mention is responsible AI.
So here at SAP, responsible AI is a very important topic for us. We do everything in our power to centrally ensure that all the the features and and new innovations we are, we are delivering are responsible and ethically checked. We have a committee. Everything is going through a process. So yes, that we just want to make sure we are not doing anything unregulated with our artificial intelligence.
So this is the SAP picture. And then we also have the open ecosystem of general purpose AI here. And the idea here is basically to keep it very open minded and very flexible things, to keep it very open minded. With respect to the general AI vendors which are available, we know things are changing in this environment. New new vendors will will come up, and we also want to give customers a choice to which vendor they want to use for their models or for their technologies. Now on the next slide, I basically have a very similar picture.
Actually. It shows most of the content, basically what you've seen before. But there's one big difference. And the the difference is that we have the business technology platform, which is spanning across all our products. This is the underlying connection between all of these products. And therefore, if we want to infuse AI into our business processes end to end, we also, of course need the BTP to fuel our efforts here. So what has been sorry, what has been going on here in in the area.
And yeah. So first of all we have the, the Cash App in the area of the cloud ERP. And this automates and simplifies the order to cash process and accounts receivables accounting with machine learning. And the basic idea here is to to match the open receivables to incoming bank statement items.
That in the area of human capital management, we have success factors, learning recommendations. And here we want to enable the users to find relevant course content from their learning libraries very fast and easily. And this is based on the user's learning history and also on on the history of other users with a very similar profile. Then we have Concord Invoice Management for the spend management and business network, which is also, yeah, helping you to to be more efficient and get more insights into your invoice management system. And in the customer relation management system, we have the customer data cloud intrusion detection, which is a very advanced product to monitor basically all the traffic. And yeah, by this detect some strange traffic in your in your system very fast.
Okay. Now this was basically the SAP strategy we have. Now what is the cloud ERP strategy on on intelligent AI. And here you can see we have it basically split into two. In the upper part it's the the customer facing side it's user driven. And in the lower part it's the impact we have on the business process.
And in the upper part Olga is going to talk a bit more about this. We have the three pillars. So I will just go over it very, very quickly. We have the human centered AI, which is basically the focus on the experience the end user has with our software. And to make the life easier for productivity tools, the idea is to bring our portfolio closer to the tools our customers are already using, for example, Microsoft Office or Google Workspace. And then last but not least, of course, the digital assistant.
Yes, I'm sure you're having heard about Jewel, right. This will be the or this is the SAP Digital assistant. But here it's really meant in a more general way to have a digital assistant.
Now, what impact does this actually has on the. The business processes. And first and foremost, I mean, the easiest you can see is to go faster, right? We want to be more efficient with with everything we are delivering. Then on the second pillar, we have to be proactivity. We want to get a specific amount of productivity into everything and just think about there might be something happening in the system, right? Something might break down and it would be great if we can get be alerted already before something breakdowns, right? Not after something breaks, but really before.
So you can really be proactive and react already and maybe you can prevent something from breaking down. Then the third point would be taking actions from insights. And here the idea is that we not only want to present our customers insights into their business data, right? Some reports or anything. We also would like to recommend them some actions, what they can take and also maybe what if scenarios.
So that is a bit a bit visionary. But if you think about having having done a sales analysis, for example, in specific regions, and then you can ask the system, what if a specific supplier cannot deliver a given material? Or what if a product is not as successful as as you expected it, right. And then you would like to get some recommendations from the system, what actions or countermeasures you could take here, but said that that is already visionary and then very visionary is the last point to automate business processes. This is really the idea to have very low touch system that you have one click and then the process or processes are being finished automatically.
Of course there are lots of open points regarding security, compliance, auditing, right? And of course we take this very serious. And maybe not every process is really, really suitable for for this, right? I mean like an end use closing or something. This is probably not what you really want to have been done. Completely automatic. But then there are also a lot simpler processes, of course, which are maybe long running and tedious. And then there's a sign off in the end, something like this we could imagine maybe to to automate completely.
All right. So from the from the strategy from the cloud ERP. How do we want to make this work in practice. Right. And this is what you can see now here on the slide. What are the technologies we need to to make our vision live and bring it to to you as a customer. And we have of course, as far as our digital core, our backbone, it's giving us the right structure and and the business processes with the data. And then we can add intelligent technologies which are fully embedded in SAP S four Hana, for example, situation handling right, where you can basically get the the right users being notified about something, what happens being a deadline coming up or a contract coming to an end, stuff like this.
Right. But of course, many more things. This would be in the embedded space. And then we also have further industry intelligent industry capabilities available side by side via our our BTP, via the SAP Business Technology platform.
And you can see there there are many bubbles in here, right? I don't want to go over them all in detail just to maybe mention 1 or 2. So the intelligent situation automation would be an extension to situation handling here, where you can automate some of the issues that might arise, and you would even have them processed in an automated fashion. Another service from the BTP, what we can commune, for example, is the AI services. Here. We can can think about services for, let's say, getting from unstructured data to extract structured data from unstructured data being text or documents.
It can also be classification or regression services and many, many more services we can access here. So this is basically yeah the the vision we have for for cloud ERP and also the technologies which are helping us to support it. And now Olga, maybe you can tell us a bit more about what has been already been shipped with cloud ERP and what's coming up. I guess that's even more important. Sure. Alessandra, thanks for the insights and I'm glad you mentioned cash application.
I'm actually did you know, I'm a big fan of Cash App. And one reason is it's one of our first AI features that was completely embedded into S four Hana and first shipped within the SAPs for Hana. But that's not the only one, right? So we have many more other functionalities available for you. Many features available you can see on this list. Please do not read through it right now.
Check them out after the sessions on your time. We have released a functionality and machine learning through the areas in finance, in sales, procurement, digital supply chain and others. And please go ahead and check them out. What can you leverage already today? What is there for you that you can use as of now? But of course we are here to actually talk about what's coming next.
And I would like to give you a preview of our future direction, our labs preview. And as it is a roadmap, it's of course a subject to change. We have four categories of feature. Intelligent features is productivity, user experience, human centered AI, and generative AI. When we talk about productivity, intelligent features that are coming up, we talk about those that maximize productivity for users, optimize operational efficiency, for example, accelerated sales order processing through prediction of missing data that helps faster completion, and users can focus on more complex tasks. And this is fully integrated into sales order front and back end.
And this is great functionality that will come up soon. We have also another category of user experience. This is our digital assistant. You mentioned it's called Jewel. I hope all by now heard the name.
And this is our central entry point to our cloud solutions from SAP. You can ask questions, you can search. You can navigate to applications.
You can even ask information on business objects. And there is much more that will come with jewels, a human centered AI. Another category there. We have really great functionality also coming up within the Fiori forms.
So if you don't have any document or unstructured data as as input or structured, and you still need to do this manual input in the form, what will happen if you start typing in and one or 2 or 3 fields? The rest of the form will be pre-filled for you automatically and proposed. And you can just accept all these proposals if they fit you or override them. And this is based on the historical data.
This is what the power of machine learning is capable of doing. Another big and large block is, of course, generative. I mean, this is a hot topic for sure this year, and I'm personally also very excited I guess Alessandria as well about this topic.
We have a lot coming up there, a lot of planned and in development. For example, we have delivery nodes extraction from the even. You make a picture of a document from you with your phone and the data will be automatically extracted and then enters SAP systems. How great is that? But that's not all we have. Document information extraction service now enhanced with generative AI that allows us to process any types of document in your company. And stay tuned, my colleagues.
Our colleagues will have a session on Document Information Extraction Service powered by generative AI right after if you're watching it live. If you watch a recording, please go ahead into the session catalog and search for generative AI or for Artificial Intelligence Track. You will find many more great sessions. All right, so how do we actually innovate in cloud ERP. We have split to broken this down to six areas. And one I've already talked about this intelligent experience.
This spans through all other business processes, includes Jewel and includes digital assistant and human centered AI. But let's talk about intelligent finance, for example. There. There's also a lot coming up with communication intelligence in finance, where we combine the power of generative AI and machine learning to analyze and prioritize the correspondence that helps to automate and significantly speed up the receivables process. So you get also generated proposed replies or even context sensitive actions being proposed in SAP Enterprise Service Management, next generation shared services automation. If I would be now an agent in our Prague shared service center, I would receive only most critical requests.
Everything else will be automatically processed with the help of generative AI and machine learning within intelligent order management. I've already spoken about smart sales order creation. When we extract the data from the unstructured documents, we store it in S four Hana. If information was missing there for some reason, it was not part of the document.
We will propose the missing fields. How great is that? Within intelligent project management, we have also generative AI common with a customer within the customer projects for intelligent supply chain planning and execution. We have not only I have to say and Alessandra, you as a data scientist will tell us, right? That is not answer for everything somewhere. We also need to avoid. Can I say traditional machine learning? Yeah. Traditional classical classic we often call it. I didn't know that machine learning will become classical.
Right? So our machine learning we have curve based forecasting available will be available for the planners and much more. And within intelligent operations we would have capabilities like next generation or AI infused visual inspection. So we know that our eyes is not like machine. We cannot compete with machines in defect in in detecting defects in manufacturing. So if there is something being produced right.
And we as humans, we will not we will not detect it as quickly as the machine. And that's what is happening here within intelligent operations and with visual inspection that during the operation, the operators during manufacturing process will be notified if there are some defects occurring. Well hopefully not, but I think this still still happens and can happen.
And with that we are integrating it with one click. You can integrate this functionality within your manufacturing process. And this is coming to the end of the content part of that. What I would like you as a take away from the session is to go ahead and please check out what is there already available for you as of today from our portfolio.
But also, please stay tuned for all the great features that come in also with generative AI. And not only. And please watch other sessions that are were already happening or will happen on generative AI and Artificial Intelligence. And with that, I think we have the time for our Q and A. I hope we have some.
Question. Hi. Welcome back. So now to our Q&A session. And yeah it's great to see so many yeah so many questions are already coming in.
And let us see. So shall I start with the first one. Maybe so.
Yeah. So we have the first question what about AI solutions for Esfahan rice or on prem. So I like it. All right. So there will be of course, we will have a premium package where you will be able to access and consume some of the functionalities there. I do not have information on on prem what will be available there.
There is of course we have some functionalities that are already released. You can check this out and check what is there from the existing functionalities for the plant ones we'll have to see. So I think this is really ongoing and internal discussions ongoing. What what can be made available. And yeah stay tuned I guess that's that's. For the new ones. Yeah.
All right. The next one. Very similar, right? Yeah, this is similar. Take another one. As perhaps this on the on the right side. Yeah. Do you know if once these features are released, they will be available in the trial account?
Yes. We do have already document information extraction available on the trial account. Perhaps you go ahead and check this out. There are also other functionalities. I'm not sure which release what you're referring to, but we have also various options. Yeah. And I think there's another section whether you can build end to end scenarios backed by API services in the trial account. And it's going in a similar direction.
Right. So I guess yes, partially it is possible, but maybe not with all services. We would need to to double check here. It depends a bit on the exact use case I guess what you want to do, but I guess some you could definitely could definitely also build. Now BTP also. Yeah okay. And yeah a lot of questions around around the the availability of the of the features in rice and private cloud.
I guess we have already covered that. I think we covered most of them, right? Yeah, I guess. That was those. Are those.
Yeah. Any other questions? If not, I think. This this one. All right. Can we have all the features related to BTP? Uh, with a dual generative AI and others with SAP s four Hana on prem.
All right. So I think that's we see many questions arising regarding on prem releases. And I think for you have to stay tuned. I don't have an answer for it right now. We will reach out to us, reach out to our colleagues, to us. We will happy to pick this up once we have the answer.
Good answer there, right? Yes, exactly. All right. I think we went through all the questions we did. So thanks a lot for all right for this. Yeah. Thanks a lot for being being so active here with the questions. It was great having you. And thanks a.
Lot from my side as well. Yeah. Have a great rest of the day. Yeah.
Fun for the rest of the sessions. Bye bye.
2023-12-12 20:57
