SAP turns every developer into an AI developer

Software giant SAP yesterday announced a comprehensive series of generative AI capabilities aimed at empowering developers of all skill levels to harness the power of AI.

At the SAP TechEd 2023 conference in Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India, the company launched innovations ranging from AI-infused pro-code tools to a one-stop shop to create generative AI extensions and applications on the SAP Business Technology Platform.

“Today’s dynamic technology and business landscape means every developer needs to be an AI developer,” said Juergen Mueller, chief technology officer and member of the executive board of SAP. “The innovations we’re launching at SAP TechEd (are) supporting the developers at the heart of the AI revolution and providing them with resources they need to transform the way businesses run.”
As organisations aim to derive business value from generative AI, effective collaboration between professional and citizen developers is essential.

In response, says SAP, it is launching SAP Build Code solutions, which streamline cooperation with business experts who use the low-code SAP Build solutions launched at SAP TechEd in 2022. Built for SAP applications and the SAP ecosystem, SAP Build Code solutions offer AI-powered productivity tools for developers and are optimised for Java and JavaScript development.
SAP Build Code also draws on the power of SAP’s new generative AI copilot Joule – the copilot that truly understands business – to further boost productivity, embedding code generation capabilities for data models, application logic and test script creation.

In the data space, SAP HANA Cloud has added new vector database features to its multimodel offerings to manage unstructured data, such as text, images or audio, and to provide long-term memory and better context to AI models. This makes it easy to find and retrieve similar objects quickly.

For example, users can search for suppliers based on the language in their contracts to examine payment history and trace individual orders. These powerful new vector database features enhance interactions between large language models and an organisation’s mission-critical data.

AI Foundation on SAP BTP, a new one-stop-shop for developers to create AI- and generative AI-powered extensions and applications on SAP BTP, will further help increase developers’ impact and efficiency. AI Foundation includes everything developers need to start creating business-ready AI tools on SAP BTP – from ready-to-use AI services and access to the top large language models to vector database capabilities and AI runtime and lifecycle management.

The rapid pace of technological innovation has driven up global demand for skilled developers, and SAP is has committed to upskill 2-million professionals by 2025. To complement free AI learning content already available, SAP yesterday launched new role-based certification and free learning resources for back-end developers using the ABAP Cloud development model.
The two new learning resources covering ABAP development tools on SAP BTP and SAP S/4HANA are available on the SAP Learning site. They are designed for agile and cloud-compliant business transformation, providing developers with skills to build cloud-ready extensions that are aligned with SAP’s clean core strategy.

SAP has also joined the Stanford HAI (Institute for Human-Centered AI) Corporate Affiliate Program. Researchers and engineers at SAP will work with the Stanford academic community, including research faculty and students, on the intersection of generative AI and business.