SAP Business AI: Release Highlights Q3 2024

As a world leader in understanding of how businesses and organizations run around the globe​, SAP is continuing to rapidly deliver traditional and generative AI use cases that help people get work done faster and smarter.

Today, one quarter ahead of our road map, we offer more than 100 high-value generative AI capabilities that are ready to use out-of-the-box across SAP cloud applications.

From navigating regulatory challenges to addressing complex HR policy questions to generating comprehensive sustainability reports, SAP Business AI capabilities are driving real business value for our customers.

For example, a company with 2,000 employees can expect to improve its top line by up to 3.5%* and gain efficiencies for the company’s bottom line of up to 1.4%* by adopting available SAP Business AI features. These productivity gains are relevant for developers and business users alike, as well as for the entire C-suite and all lines of businesses — from the CFO to the chief human resources officer, chief procurement officer, and more.

And this only accounts for AI features that we released in the last 12 months.

AI innovations delivered in Q3 2024 include:

• SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition has a flurry of AI-assisted improvements, from smart summaries and filters to natural language explanations of asset depreciation as well as accelerating your financial close. In addition, Joule can now proactively detect and generate proposals for missing compliance configurations around U.S. internal tax. Joule is now also generally available in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition.
• In supply chain, conversational search features in SAP Product Lifecycle Management, SAP Integrated Business Planning for supply chain, and SAP Asset Performance Management allow users to perform informal searches more efficiently and access information more easily. In SAP Field Service Management, the AI-assisted activity summary is now generally available. The AI-enabled visual inspection feature has been expanded to SAP Asset Performance Management.
• In SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), a new AI capability in SAP Integration Suite lets developers automatically generate integration flows by simply describing the scenario, meaning designing time is three times faster*. SAP Build Code provides generative AI to help developers build applications up to 30%* quicker and reduce application development costs by up to 30%*.
• Sustainability experts can now automate AI-enabled environmental, societal, and governance (ESG) reports, reducing the time needed to collect relevant ESG metrics manually from 30 minutes* to 30 seconds*, building on ESG or own report templates and using the data available in SAP Sustainability Control Tower.
• SAP Signavio offers AI-assisted process recommender and AI-assisted performance indicator recommender features, which can provide preconfigured process models and quick recommendations on performance indicators. The new AI-assisted process analyzer capability allows users to ask questions in natural language and receive immediate insights, democratizing process mining and empowering non-technical users to conduct deep analysis.

While we’re incredibly excited about what we can offer customers today, there is so much more to come still this year and beyond. That said, we will increase our target of delivering more than 100 generative AI use cases by the end of 2024. We’re only accelerating the pace of innovation, so that across our entire range of solutions, customers can find SAP Business AI capabilities that offer businesses large-scale ROI benefits and, on an individual level, improve employees’ day-to-day work.  

Today at this year’s SAP TechEd, we are announcing multiple innovations that will revolutionize how we work and make businesses more agile and productive. With cutting-edge innovations to come, including collaborative agents and knowledge graphs, these benefits will become even more impactful and relevant for business users across industries and geographies. Of course, we’re doing all of this while ensuring that our SAP Business AI features are relevant, reliable, and responsible.

Read on for a detailed accounting of the new AI innovations we have released to customers in Q3 2024, and join us at SAP TechEd to learn more about what’s ahead.

SAP Business AI in ERP & Finance

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition: Joule
General availability

Available since Q2, users have been able to directly navigate to business applications. Now, the integration of  SAP’s AI copilot Joule in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition allows for:

• Conversational search, allowing users to perform informational searches up to 95%* faster with quick and seamless access to the relevant content from SAP Help Portal by asking Joule in natural language for the information they need.
• Up to 95%* faster insights into relevant business objects for purchasing experts and shipping, without the need to navigate to the application that provides the insights. This includes, for example, purchase requisitions, sales orders, and more. 

Get started here.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition: AI-assisted smart summarization
Beta release

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition customers can now benefit from a much smoother SAP Fiori experience by using AI-assisted smart summarization jump-starts. This feature allows users to collaborate or follow up by extracting the essential information from the object pages of the SAP Fiori Elements application that they use. Users can expect more than five minutes* saved per summarization.

Watch the demo and sign up to the beta program.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition: AI-assisted easy filter
Beta release

The AI-assisted easy filter capability helps sales representatives select data of list report-based SAP Fiori applications in natural language instead of defining filter values manually. This streamlines the filtering experience to quickly get the required information.

Watch the demo and sign up to the beta program.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition: AI-assisted explanation of fixed asset deprecation keys
Beta release

Asset accountants can use AI-assisted explanation of fixed asset deprecation keys to analyze asset values per deprecation area. The feature explains depreciation types and calculation procedures in natural language, increasing the accuracy of financial and tax statements. Users can save up to 60 hours*​ of onboarding efforts per country version and 0.5 days*​ for analyzing asset values during period closing times.

Watch the demo and sign up to the beta program.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition: AI-assisted configuration for U.S. tax jurisdictions
Beta release

Tax accountants can now simplify the process of maintaining U.S.-internal tax configuration with the help of Joule. The AI copilot proactively detects and generates proposals for missing compliance configurations. This ensures faster onboarding for businesses in the United States with less complexity and greater accuracy and reliability compliance with the Tax Authority website integration. Companies can expect a reduction of 50-90%* in effort to set up U.S. sales and use tax configuration.

Watch the demo and sign up to the beta program.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition: AI-assisted financial business insights
Beta release

With the help of generative AI, employees in finance departments can analyze and summarize data from their cost center review booklet into actionable financial business insights. This empowers them with a complete picture, including root cause analyses, suggested rectifications, and written reports. It also increases efficiency by prioritizing workload, automating repetitive tasks, and recommending actions. Finance costs also get reduced via immediate visibility into critical KPIs, AI-generated reports, and instant sharing. With this feature, business users can expect to save up to 50% of their time per summarization of financial data in a review booklet and 2x accelerated decision-making.

Watch the demo and sign up to the beta program.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition: AI-assisted localized form template management, AI-assisted merging for payment formats
Beta release

We introduced two generative AI-assisted localization apps as part of the localization-as a-self-service for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition:

• The Manage Localized Form Templates app allows application owners to extend localized forms, such as payment receipts, to meet their specific requirements. The feature reduces the time and cost for localized form template creation by up to 95%* compared to a manual mapping in a third-party tool.

• With the Generative AI Merge for Payment Formats feature in the Payments app, business users can create customized payment formats using generative AI-generated mappings. This simplifies adapting payment formats to local standards, increasing accuracy and reducing by up to 60%* the time and cost to update payment formats compared to a manual review of the changes.

SAP Advanced Financial Closing: AI-assisted error resolution
Beta release

The AI-assisted error resolution feature helps controllers and accountants to understand the root causes of issues that arise during financial closing. It provides step-by-step guidance for fixing the error and the option to manually email the resolution to the expert in charge. By identifying errors and analyzing root causes faster, users can reduce efforts to investigate and remediate errors in automated closing tasks by up to 90%* (approximately two hours saved* per financial close), ensuring faster financial closing and lower support and compliance costs.

Watch the demo, sign up to the beta program, and read the product documentation.

SAP Signavio: AI-assisted process recommender and AI-assisted performance indicator recommender
General availability

Business process consultants can now benefit from new generative AI-powered capabilities in SAP Signavio.

The AI-assisted process recommender capability helps to obtain preconfigured process models based on a database of more than 5,000 best practices from SAP, allowing process experts to move fast from initial exploration to process design and reducing the effort needed for a first process draft to start the process modeling. This reduces the time invested from business process consultants by up to 30%*, and the costs of designing a new process or redesigning an existing one can be reduced by 30%*.

The AI-assisted performance indicator recommender feature helps users obtain quick recommendations on process performance indicators (PPIs) relevant to their business processes and problems. This allows users to solve problems through a measurement approach based on a repository of thousands of KPIs and PPIs. The time and cost of refining process performance indicators can be reduced by up to 20%*.

SAP Signavio: AI-assisted process analyzer (text-to-insights)
Beta release

With the new AI-assisted process analyzer capability, users can ask questions in natural language and receive immediate insights that can accelerate business decisions by up to 50%*. It democratizes process mining and empowers non-technical users to conduct a deep analysis and obtain valuable knowledge.

Get started here.

SAP Business AI in IT & Platform

SAP Integration Suite: Generation of integrations
General availability

Developers can now automatically generate integration flows in SAP Integration Suite. Users only need to describe the integration scenario and the tool will then create an integration flow with pre-configured connectors based on their description and inputs. This helps to quickly integrate processes, services, applications, events, and data across heterogeneous system landscapes and enhance productivity.

With over 3,600 prebuilt integration flows, users can reduce the time needed for designing the integration by a factor of three*, resulting in cost savings with improved quality, as well as reduced implementation effort.

Get started here.

SAP Build Code: Support SAP S/4HANA Cloud service integration for data model and app logic
General availability

SAP Build Code, SAP’s generative AI-based code development solution, allows developers to build applications up to 30% faster. This can reduce application development costs by up to 30%*. The integration of Joule, optimized for Java and JavaScript application development, provides a turnkey environment for coding, testing, integrations, and application lifecycle management.

Starting in Q3, Joule will help developers to generate code for integrated SAP S/4HANA Cloud services. This is started by creating a full-stack application, importing an external SAP S/4HANA Cloud service, and defining the data model and services with Joule.

In addition, developers can use Joule to enhance the data model they created before by adding associations between the external SAP S/4HANA Cloud entity and local entities, and exposing the external entity to a local service via a projection afterward.

Joule also supports custom logic generation for reading the associated external entity and to perform further operations on the exposed external entity.

Get started here.

SAP HANA Cloud: Generate SAP HANA SQL statements with the SQL console for SAP HANA
General availability

SAP HANA database application developers can use the new conversational SQL console in SAP Business Application Studio to generate SAP HANA SQL statements. The statements are based on the requirements specified in a special natural language prompt, which can be run directly in the SQL console. The resulting statement includes the correct SAP HANA syntax.

Note: To use the ‘Run Prompt’ option, you must have a subscription to SAP Build Code, the AI-powered cloud development environment based on SAP Business Application Studio.

The new console helps increase developer productivity by up to 20%*, reducing the SQL learning curve and enabling efficient data retrieval with natural language.

For more details, look at the product documentation.

Document Information Extraction service: Product enhancements
General availability

Available on SAP BTP, the Document Information Extraction service helps businesses automate and scale their document processing use case end-to-end in more than 40 languages with easy extensions for any kind of document.

This upgrade includes three significant enhancements designed to streamline your document processing:

Instant learning: The premium edition of Document Information Extraction now features an instant learning capability. This allows for immediate improvements in accuracy as the service learns dynamically from user feedback. Just a few corrections from the user enable the system to adapt and enhance its performance, making document processing more precise than ever.

Enhanced document classification: With the new field type “list of value,” users can specify their own classification classes or categories; for example, to distinguish a supplier invoice from a payment advice. By providing a list of classification values when setting up a schema, they can tailor the service to automatically determine the type of incoming document according to their business processes. This results in more organized document handling, enabling faster and more accurate document processing.

Expanded availability on Microsoft Azure: To meet the growing global demand, the availability of the service has been extended to additional Microsoft Azure regions: Netherlands (Amsterdam) and U.S. East (Virginia). The service now incorporates:

• Extended schema description, to get the most out of generative AI for document processing
• New file types and improved performance, to get support for key Microsoft Office formats, including MS Excel and MS Word
• Schema import and export to easily share schemas across different projects or environments, enhancing consistency and saving valuable setup time

Get started with these new features.

Generative AI Hub in SAP AI Core and SAP AI Launchpad: Product enhancements
General availability

The generative AI hub in SAP AI Core and SAP AI Launchpad enables developers to access market-leading large language models (LLMs) in a governed environment, run AI models securely and cost-effectively, and maximize value creation from generative AI use cases for SAP applications.

Developers can save up to 60%* of their time spent onboarding and running AI models securely and realize higher value for new generative AI use cases through better grounding for increased relevance of the outcomes, resulting in faster user adoption. 

In the last quarter, we introduced two key enhancements:

• A new modular and intuitive orchestration builder helps create sophisticated, AI-driven applications by customizing pre-trained AI models for specific business use purposes through a guided process in the generative AI hub
• A simplified integration and customization process lets developers deliver innovations faster and more precisely, enabling more relevant and effective AI-driven solutions for better business outcomes

This feature also comes with a data masking and anonymization function for personal and sensitive data in prompts and LLM responses to enhance data privacy and compliance with data protection regulations.

A new JavaScript software development kit (SDK) helps integrate advanced AI capabilities into web applications. This user-friendly toolkit makes it easier to embed intelligent features such as chatbots and content generators, speeding up development and giving users more context-aware and relevant AI-generated content.

Finally, additional models from providers such as Google Cloud Platform, Meta, and OpenAI have been added to generative AI hub, and new data centers on Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure are available in Europe and in the United States.

Get started with generative AI hub in SAP AI Core and generative AI hub in SAP AI Launchpad.

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SAP Business AI in Sales, Services, Marketing and Commerce

SAP CX AI Toolkit: Product enhancements
General availability

SAP CX AI Toolkit provides a comprehensive, configurable AI solution for e-commerce, marketing, sales, and service teams. It helps streamline content creation tasks and analyze data from across the enterprise. Many new AI-enabled tools are now integrated into the solution.

AI-supported image generation enables e-commerce teams to generate new product images or edit existing ones in the SAP Commerce Cloud catalog. It reduces the time spent on image customization by up to 50%* and increases the number of product-specific campaigns by up to 30%*. With this feature, e-commerce teams can also boost engagement with eye-catching, on-brand visuals tailored to commerce catalogs and effortlessly remove backgrounds or place products on solid-color backdrops.

Intelligent Q&A support for service tickets and cases generates answers to business questions by finding and compiling the content of cases in SAP Service Cloud and tickets from SAP Cloud for Customers as sources for answers, saving time searching through thousands of records. Services teams can also integrate custom data sources and improve the answers provided by their unique company data.

Check out the release notes for a complete overview of the innovations and get started with the product documentation.

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SAP Business AI in Industries

SAP Intelligent Agriculture: Farming intelligence – create and process farming recommendations
General availability

SAP Intelligent Agriculture now enables agribusinesses to create and process recommendations on when, where, and how to conduct farming activities, hence sustainably increasing farming efficiency and helping them thrive. These recommendations can either be created through an API for data science models or created in the solution UI directly.

Get started here.

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SAP Business AI in Procurement

SAP Business Network: Intelligent invoice error classification
SAP Early Adopter Care

The invoice error classification feature helps suppliers process rejected invoices for payment in SAP Business Network and reprocess invoices accurately to address initial invoice submission errors after categorizing them into appropriate rejection categories. Suppliers can expect to reduce invoice re-processing time by up to 40%* and reduce days sales outstanding impacted by rejected invoices by up to 10%*.

Get started here.

SAP Concur: Chart of accounts mapping for product connectors
General availability

In Concur Expense, users can now access an AI-generated chart of accounts mapping for product connectors, such as QuickBooks or Xero, and decrease the setup time and effort of expense-type administration activities, including, for example, expense type creation and account code mapping.

Get started here.

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SAP Business AI in Supply Chain

SAP Product Lifecycle Management: Joule
General availability

SAP Integrated Business Planning for supply chain & SAP Asset Performance Management: Joule
SAP Early Adopter Care

The conversational search feature within Joule is now supported in SAP digital supply chain solutions, providing smooth and contextual access to SAP Help Portal content and summarizing it in a clear answer to the question. Users can perform informal searches up to 95%* because they do not need to browse through a long search result list or read through several documents to find the correct information.

Watch this short demo of Joule in SAP Integrated Business Planning for supply chain:

Get started with Joule.

SAP Field Service Management: AI-assisted activity summary
General availability

Dispatchers and field service workers can now generate summaries of activities, such as used spare parts, the duration of the activity, and the results of performed checklists, and improve the review and planning of service requests by up to 15%*. Activity summaries enhance dispatchers’ decision-making by providing contextual information based on similar past events. They also increase the first-visit resolution rate by helping dispatchers quickly identify the right technician for the job, and field service workers understand the job at hand better and find the right solutions faster.

Get started here.

SAP Asset Performance Management: Visual inspection
Beta release

Already available to SAP Digital Manufacturing Cloud customers since Q2 2024, the AI-enabled visual inspection feature supports asset owners, plant managers, and reliability engineers in monitoring asset conditions to identify critical asset health conditions, such as wear or failure modes, before unplanned downtimes with severe consequences can occur.

The feature collects images from cameras monitoring assets and AI-derived indicator values, displays them appropriately in the context of the asset history and other sensor data, and defines condition monitoring rules to create automated alerts and maintenance notifications based on images analyzed with AI. This enables various asset-intensive industries — such as oil and gas, mining, or railway and transportation — to reduce manual visual inspections by humans and transition from reactive or proactive maintenance toward prescriptive maintenance strategies.

Request a demo.

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SAP Business AI in Sustainability

SAP Sustainability Control Tower: AI-assisted ESG report generation
General availability

ESG leads can now automate AI-enabled ESG reports and embed the sustainability strategy into program execution, reducing the time needed to collect relevant ESG metrics manually from 30 minutes* to 30 seconds* and time to write reports by up to 80%*. Sustainability experts can build on SAP-delivered report templates that follow common ESG reporting standards or customize their own, generate automated draft reports for periodic internal or external reporting based on ESG data available in SAP Sustainability Control Tower, and benefit from an enhanced accuracy of reported ESG data and quality of documentation.

Get started here.

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Philipp Herzig is chief AI officer of SAP.

SAP TechEd in 2024: Innovations across the end-to-end SAP portfolio are revolutionizing the tech world

*Disclaimer: Values mentioned in this blog post are estimates based on average industry benchmark numbers, from an SAP analysis. Customers interested in a specific business case calculation can consult their SAP account team.