Don’t worry - AI Will Solve all of Your SAP Problems!

When I was a Gartner Analyst, specialising in SAP, there was one word to sum up all SAP customers: busy. Busy doing project implementations, rollouts, upgrades, testing and hopefully – measuring the actual business benefits over the entire SAP lifecycle.

Then along comes the IT next big thing, AI of course, with promises to help make these tasks considerably less busy for end users. Sounds fantastic, but do you believe that AI will solve all of your SAP problems?

Let’s see how Gartner positions AI.

To quote Mary Mesaglio, Distinguished VP Analyst from the 2023 Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo conference, “AI is not just a technology, and it isn’t just a business trend. It’s a fundamental shift in how humans and machines interact, and it affects every executive across the team.”

Mary rightly classifies AI into 2 types:

• “Every day AI”: which is essentially about productivity improvement of existing business processes. It is departmental-specific.

• “Game-changing AI”: which is much more ambitious and is about creating new business opportunities and business models. It can be disruptive and risky, as well as game changing. By definition, it is enterprise-wide and must be CEO-led.

This short article focuses on what busy SAP customers can do to maximise the potential of Everyday AI, rather than the latter.

The first word of caution is that all IT Vendors have new products and services for AI, especially Generative AI. But they are just that, new, so you have to be extremely wary with early versions of any of them.

AI is currently at the peak of the technology hype cycle.  To put it into perspective “SAP Business AI” has introduced 50 new AI product innovations since Q4 last year, with 100 targeted for delivery by SAP in 2024. This includes:

• SAP ERP: e.g. intelligent invoice matching, assisted anomaly detection and automation of communication-heavy business processes

• SAP HR: e.g. intelligent HR self-service capabilities

• SAP Procurement: e.g. spend analytics, sourcing, contract management, ourchase-2-pay and supplier management

• SAP Sustainability Control Tower: e.g. AI-enabled ESG reporting

• SAP Signavio: e.g. recommended business process models and KPIs

• SAP Business Technology Platform: e.g. application development, integration, data management and a generative AI hub

• SAP Joule: a business co-pilot, i.e. an AI assistant, integrated with many of these SAP applications and technologies

But some businesses’, rather than experiencing AI solving all of their SAP problems, are seeing their costly AI projects end in failure.  To mitigate this here is what I would do if I were in your shoes:

1. Conduct a joint business/IT review of your existing business applications strategy. Involve your SAP Centre Of Expertise, if you have one.

2. Remind yourself whether you are you really an “ERP-type” customer of SAP? Or more a broader business applications “suite-type” customer? Consider how successful you’ve been with SAP to date?

3. Review any new AI product innovations within this context and the entitlement of your current SAP license. Remember, to get the latest SAP innovations you need a cloud type license. Identify any new SAP capabilities that make sense for your strategy.

4. Check whether some of your current SAP challenges can be solved through automation tools other than AI, e.g., RPA for business processes, or automation tools for SAP Basis operations?

5. Check whether your SAP data (master, transaction, archived) is all clean before embarking on sophisticated AI analytics?

6. Check if your Enterprise Architects already have an overall AI Strategy?

7. Review your level of AI skills in house, bring in real experts as necessary.

8. Identify the most suitable AI pilot projects.

9. Tread carefully and realistically.  Be prepared to fail fast as you go through the AI learning curve.

10. Plan how best to prepare your end users for adoption of these new capabilities.

Some early adopters have reported escalating costs of hardware and cloud costs for their AI solutions, and to mitigate this risk, it is important to stay focused on the business value delivered by all of your SAP solutions as a whole.

Doing all of these things will ensure you make considered decisions on AI adoption, not just with a view to solving all of your SAP problems, but in the context of your wider business strategy.