Kathy Gibson reports from SAP Connect – Word on the street is that agentic artificial intelligence (AI) heralds the end of the ERP era.
Not so, says Nazia Pillay, MD: southern Africa at SAP.
“ERP is no longer just a system of record,” she tells delegates to SAP Connect taking place today in Kyalami.
“With agentic AI, we can ensure it runs end-to-end business processes, creating autonomous ERP.”
Today, AI supports 30% of tasks in the average business, according to an Oxford Economics study. And this is projected to rise to 48% in the next two years.
Marc Nolla, vice-president: customer advisory for EMEA at SAP, points out that around 40 000 of SAP’s customers have already adopted SAP Business AI in their productive systems.
“And we are learning from that,” he says.
Nolla believes SAP is well placed to help customers adopt AI, through its SAP Autonomous Enterprise vision.
The key components of this vision are three-fold
“You have the capability to bring teams long with one engagement layer – Joule.
“Teams connect with embedded agents and AI in SAP Autonomous Suite, using best practices and processes.
“And customers have the ability to extend agents, maintaining context and reasoning, and ensuring governance with SAP Business AI Platform.”
Nolla explains that Joule is the engagement layer that connects experts in the business with the AI processes.
It has been available for some time and has been widely used to unify the AI experience. It has also been updated along the way, for instance with Joule Consultants that have more than 100 certifications.
A few weeks ago, SAP announced additional evolutions. leveraging Harness-powered Joule and Joule Work to create spaces for specific tasks.
“Joule is the engagement layer to bring the people along,” Nolla summarises.
Adding the processes and best practices, SAP Autonomous Suite embeds AI scenarios throughout the portfolio, from HR, customer service, supply chain, finance and industry solutions.
With hundreds of agents available, Joule Assistants help workers by bringing together the relevant agents to perform specific tasks.
“Think of it as a new team member helping staff accomplish their goals,” Nolla says.
In addition, SAP Industry AI is AI that already knows how specific industries operate, so the system can work with context.
“But does AI have a true understanding of your business? Is it aligned to your KPIs, and does it have the governance in place?” Nolla asks.
“SAP Business AI Platform brings these capabilities to the business.”
With Joule Studio giving workers the ability to create new agents on the fly, the possibility of hundreds – even thousands – of agents within the business could become unwieldly.
“So governance is more important than ever,” Nolla says. “The AI Agent Hub gives IT the ability to connect and understand these agents. They can discover, manage and govern all the agents in one place.
“This gives the business power, control and trust.”
Within the next few months, SAP will also release enriched agentic AI tools and assistants to help with data management, configuration, development and testing to improve migration projects.