SAP Announces New GenAI Tools
The idea behind the innovation is to assist enterprises to put their data to better use
SAP has come out with several new and enhanced GenAI-led tools that aim to help enterprises put their unwieldy and voluminous data to better use. These tools are built on a business data fabric concept that centralizes, connects, manages and governs information bytes from across multiple systems and applications within an organization.
There’s a new AI copilot and AI governance features for SAP Datasphere and the SAP Analytics Cloud, which the company’s CTO Jurgen Muellar described as a “quantum leap” in their ability to help customers drive intelligent business transformation through data. The new announcement also includes an extended partnership with data governance specialist Collibra.
Targeting better data capture and usage
At the crux of the issue is an effort by technology companies to create solutions that could help companies achieve true digital transformation. Currently, research estimates that the world is creating a staggering 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day, of which a majority is not accessed and a good chunk doesn’t get used to generate insights. Just 32% of this data is being used.
In fact, SAP had unveiled Datasphere more than a year ago as a comprehensive data service built on its Business Technology Platform. Its stated aim was to create a unified experience for data integration, cataloging, semantic modeling, data warehousing, data federation and data virtualization among other things.
Datasphere is now a reality
The latest announcement is just the culmination of the initial part of this vision with the collaboration with Collibra helping them integrate their AI governance platform with SAP’s own data assets to facilitate data governance for non-SAP customer environments. This provides customers with the ability to use Collibra as a catalog of catalogs.
Besides governance, SAP also announced the integration of SAP SAC, the business intelligence and planning solution, with its GenAI copilot Joule that was launched last September. This would help users create and develop reports, dashboards, plans etc and help SAP offer a single data management system and advanced analytics for cross-divisional operational planning at the enterprise level.
In other words, planners within a company would have a single tool that could slice and dice across data silos to prepare the data, model it and use it for planning. So, one can just ask Joule within the SAC to develop financial plans or any other types of plans and the outcomes would be delivered automatically.
Copilot Joule gets smarter now
But that’s not all that Joule can do. The company is also making copilot available across the entire range of SaaS applications at SAP. In the future, Joule would behave in the context of an application or product that one is working on. In the SuccessFactors app, Joule would perform the role of HR assistant while on SAP Build, it would assist the developer to generate code.
Another innovation comes in the form of the SAP Datasphere knowledge graph that would help enterprises provide insights into their data relationships and patterns across apps and systems. These knowledge graphs are semantics used to search data across multiple sources and forge connections between them to better understand how they work together.
The idea is not to provide more data, but to add better context to all the data when seen together. With knowledge graphs, users would be able to see much better insights from the system based on its ability to cut across data silos. Currently, such information requires close collaboration across multiple different platforms.
