AI has enormous potential for almost every company. SAP customers are therefore faced with the question of which technologies SAP offers them to upgrade and enhance their existing system landscapes.
For the longest time, artificial intelligence (AI) was nothing more than exciting material for science fiction novels and movies. In 1982, Harrison Ford was hunting down replicants in ‘Blade Runners’; in 2001, Steven Spielberg wove an intricate tale of a relationship between human and machine in ‘A. I.’
Technologies that emulate or surpass human skills and characteristics are fascinating – not only on the big screen. For decades, scientists have dedicated time and money to the topic of artificial intelligence. The workshop ‘Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence’, held in 1956 at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, USA, is seen as the starting point of AI as academic subject.
Progress in the field of AI wasn’t exactly on the curriculum during that workshop at Dartmouth. However, over the past few years, the futuristic visions of scientists and Hollywood directors alike have become more realistic as the power of computers continues to increase, more digital, connected products are flooding the market, and our society and economy are producing enormous amounts of digital data.
What AI can and can’t do
What we are missing is a valid common definition of AI or, more generally, what counts as intelligence. What we can say without the shadow of a doubt is this: To some degree, machines are capable of autonomously making decisions and acting on them. They are capable of recognizing and analyzing patterns in data, language or images. In most of these cases, machines do significantly better than humans, as their analysis is usually faster, more comprehensive, and more accurate. Technology-based methods – like machine learning – are a requirement for these processes to work seamlessly.
AI: Potential value of €430 bil.
Since ‘strong AI’ is still a distant vision of the future, today’s focus is more on ‘weak AI’, meaning manageable, ethical software and solutions for practical use cases. According to consulting firm PwC, (weak) AI alone will generate value of €430 billion in Germany until 2030. In another study, PwC studied the most common use cases of artificial intelligence. A majority of respondents indicated that they used AI for automating existing business process and analyzing data. AI is the most useful when dealing with one individual, complex task involving an enormous amount of data.
Automation through ML and AI
Instead, SAP is now focusing on business processes and company-specific requirements by integrating innovations and individual solutions. SAP offers customers different ways to join the world of artificial intelligence, each of which is tailored to different target groups while still complementing the others.
In its new ERP system S/4 Hana, SAP has embedded some AI functionalities which are supposed to make individual S/4 applications intelligent. The goal is the automation of routine tasks to relieve employees of monotonous work, shifting their focus to more complex scenarios. There is more than one approach to reach this goal.
SAP Data Intelligence
Running on SAP Cloud Platform (SCP), SAP Data Intelligence is by far the most elaborate AI solution in SAP’s portfolio. While it is the most likely ‘successor’ of Leonardo, the focus has shifted to business. SAP Data Intelligence combines a more conservative business world with open source, making it more open to different solutions and applications, like Jupyter Notebooks (Project Jupyter), Python and Python-based frameworks for machine learning like pandas, scikit-learn or TensorFlow.
Focused AI strategy
With SAP Data Intelligence, the created data models can be transferred to a company’s SAP landscape for further development, testing, and performance monitoring. And, most importantly, AI scenarios can be audited, complying with regulatory guidelines.
SAP has recognized that AI is an important – if not the most important – technology topic and is enthusiastically adding to its existing portfolio without losing sight of business requirements. Actively researching AI is not SAP’s forte, however. Companies like Facebook, Google or Microsoft as well as open source initiatives are and will continue to be the driving force in AI innovation.