In Bangalore, at the SAP TechEd event held in 2023, SAP SE unveiled a comprehensive array of generative AI capabilities and advancements. These innovations are strategically designed to empower developers of all levels of expertise in harnessing the potential of artificial intelligence and supercharging their businesses in the era of AI.
Juergen Mueller, the Chief Technology Officer and a member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, emphasized the evolving landscape of technology and business. He stressed that in today's dynamic environment, every developer needs to embrace AI technology. The innovations introduced at SAP TechEd span from AI-infused pro-code tools to a unified platform for developing generative AI extensions and applications on the SAP Business Technology Platform. These offerings aim to support the developers who are at the forefront of the AI revolution, equipping them with the necessary resources to transform the way businesses operate.
Effective collaboration between professional and citizen developers is crucial for organizations seeking to derive business value from generative AI. To facilitate this collaboration, SAP is launching the SAP Build Code solutions. These solutions streamline cooperation with business experts who leverage the low-code SAP Build solutions introduced at SAP TechEd in 2022. Uniquely tailored for SAP applications and the SAP ecosystem, SAP Build Code solutions provide developers with AI-powered productivity tools, optimized for Java and JavaScript development. Additionally, SAP Build Code leverages the capabilities of SAP's new generative AI copilot, Joule, a copilot that comprehends business intricacies, further enhancing productivity by embedding code generation capabilities for data modeling, application logic, and test script creation.
High-quality AI relies on sound data, and SAP HANA Cloud continues to lead the way in data innovation. It introduces new vector database features as part of its multimodel offerings at no additional cost. Vector data stores effectively manage unstructured data like text, images, or audio, providing long-term memory and richer context to AI models. This simplifies the process of finding and retrieving similar objects swiftly. For instance, users can search for suppliers based on the language used in their contracts, enabling an examination of payment history and the tracking of individual orders. These potent vector database features enhance interactions between extensive language models and an organization's mission-critical data. This innovation positions SAP developers at the forefront of delivering significantly enhanced data insights while maintaining a secure and private framework that utilizes industry-specific customer data to minimize discrepancies.
SAP's AI Foundation on SAP BTP serves as a centralized hub for developers to create AI- and generative AI-powered extensions and applications on SAP BTP. This further augments developers' impact and efficiency. AI Foundation encompasses all the necessary components for developers to initiate the development of AI tools ready for business use on SAP BTP. This includes readily available AI services, access to leading large language models, vector database capabilities, and AI runtime and lifecycle management.
The rapid pace of technological innovation has spurred global demand for skilled developers. In response, SAP is expanding its learning opportunities in parallel. As part of its commitment to upskill two million professionals by 2025 and complement the existing free AI learning content, SAP has introduced new role-based certification and free learning resources tailored for back-end developers using the ABAP Cloud development model. These resources cover ABAP development tools on SAP BTP and SAP S/4HANA and can be accessed through the SAP Learning site. They are designed to equip developers with the skills needed to build cloud-ready extensions that align with SAP's clean core strategy. Additionally, SAP has joined the Stanford HAI (Institute for Human-Centered AI) Corporate Affiliate Program, fostering collaboration between SAP researchers and engineers and the Stanford academic community, including research faculty and students, at the intersection of generative AI and business.
