Product of the Day
SAP unifies enterprise AI
Business Data Cloud, SAP’s new SaaS offering, integrates and governs data from various sources, including third-party systems, writes JASON BANNIER.
SAP has launched Business Data Cloud (BDC), a fully managed software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that unifies and governs SAP data, and connects with third-party data.
As an evolution of the software giant’s data, planning, and analytics solutions, BDC brings together SAP Datasphere, SAP Analytics Cloud, and SAP Business Warehouse with an integrated experience to deliver insights.
Enterprise AI challenges
Many enterprises are finding it difficult to scale AI beyond experimentation, said Muhammad Alam, SAP executive board member and head of product and engineering, during the SAP Business Unleashed virtual event last week.
“Our customers are telling us that they’re struggling to implement and realise the value of AI in their organisations,” he said. “It’s hard to get reliable data, high-quality datasets across the enterprise to power this AI. Many have done hundreds of proofs of concept, but have not been able to get them to production effectively.”
Alam said SAP aims to address these challenges by leveraging its end-to-end business suite, which integrates finance, supply chain, human capital management, and customer experience. He says that SAP’s modular and composable applications allow businesses to start where they face the most pressing challenges while ensuring seamless integration across functions.
“As an organisation, you can’t be resilient if the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.”
SAP Business Data Cloud
SAP BDC is designed to provide a structured and governed data environment for enterprises. The offering builds on SAP’s expertise in business processes and integrates directly with SAP applications to deliver harmonised, data products.
“Customers spend millions of dollars trying to bring this data set together to harmonise it and have the right quality around it,” said Alam.
He said that BDC will eliminate this challenge by ensuring SAP data remains managed, governed, and easily accessible for AI-driven insights.
BDC is enhanced by a new partnership between SAP and DataBricks.
“The partnership brings the power of SAP applications and the data that these applications create, natively and seamlessly, with the power of the world’s leading data platform company in the world – Databricks. Databricks’ capabilities are natively available with SAP BDC, and we continue to partner and co-develop capabilities to really help our customers unlock the power of data in the age of AI. With SAP Databricks, you get the world’s most important data set with the world’s leading data platform capabilities.”
AI-powered agents
Alongside BDC, SAP revealed an AI agent builder, and a set of AI agents designed to streamline finance, sales, and service functions.
These agents will assist with:
- Cash and dispute management.
- Question and answer and case classification.
- Automated insights for finance, HR, and supply chain operations.
SAP’s agent builder allows enterprises to customise and develop their own AI-powered assistants, leveraging SAP’s business process knowledge and structured data to enhance decision-making. SAP’s Knowledge Graph plays a crucial role in orchestrating these agents, ensuring they operate within the correct business process contexts.
“If you don’t have these key ingredients – which is the business process, knowledge and access to high quality data – all those agent builder capabilities are just backend-as-a-service capabilities, which then leaves the last long mile to our customers to be able to provide the context, do the integration, provide the data, to be able to have just one agent out there.”
The future of SAP’s enterprise cloud strategy
With BDC and AI-powered agents, SAP is positioning itself as the go-to provider for enterprises looking to harness AI at scale.
“Without good data, you basically have no AI,” said Alam. “Similarly, without a harmonised data set across the entirety of your business – one that is semantically rich and it can understand the complex relationship between millions of fields and hundreds of thousands of tables – your use of AI can only be very basic and functionally siloed.
“With our deep business process understanding through the SAP Business Suite, combined with the semantically rich data managed and governed at high quality within SAP BDC, we believe we are uniquely positioned to help our customers realise the full potential of AI.”
* Visit the SAP website here.
