In the past, it was mostly a joke for employees to manage it, but with the advent of the AI era, it is becoming a practical and feasible way to operate. At the 2024 SAP China Summit held not long ago, the case of a guitar company attracted the attention of many attendees, and when the guitar company was faced with the need to expand the European market, a series of processes from site selection, stocking to recruitment, and financial management were completed with only natural language conversations.
AI that transforms business processes
During the whole demonstration process, the most eye-catching one was Joule, the "intelligent co-pilot" of SAP business AI, who could query the cities with the most business potential and give reference opinions on store location selection from the beginning of business planning. Immediately, just say to Joule, just like you would with the popular generative AI assistant, "Help me hire a guitar store manager." "You can automatically complete the screening of employees on the list who are suitable for this position. For example, it can also directly check the inventory status in multiple stores through dialogue, and complete the allocation to reduce production costs.
Dr. Huang Chenhong, Executive Vice President of SAP and President of Greater China, said that in this case, AI has implemented a total of six scenarios, namely, assisting in store location selection, AI stocking, recruitment, establishing customer apps, optimizing inventory, and realizing a financial system that realizes personalized payment synchronization. Joule, who can communicate in natural language, has opened up all SAP business processes, such as supply chain management, human resource management, customer relationship management, etc.
At the 2024 SAP China Summit, whether it was in the exhibition area at the conference site or in Dr. Huang Chenhong's keynote speech, it was found that the help of AI for people in different positions is becoming more and more obvious.
AI has a new understanding of the relationship between people and work, and one of the most brain-making things for the author is actually SAP's Van Gogh cat "Office Cat" when introducing business AI to the outside world. For example, Delta Air Lines' human resources officers are using SAP AI-powered SuccessFactors (HR Cloud) to help companies retain top employees, increasing retention rates by 98%. At the same time, the vacated or newly added management positions will be matched with employee technology through AI, so that 25% of front-line employees can get promotion opportunities. It also helps Delta maintain a consistently high level of service quality.
Another interesting example comes from AMD, a company that consumers like to call "Yes", and the popular market is inseparable from the on-time delivery of orders, which is also the role of the COO. However, there are often 14 steps behind an order, and it used to take 20 minutes to check it down. With the help of AI to get through all links, the query time can be as low as less than 1 minute. AI has improved efficiency across the supply chain.
For a multinational food and beverage ingredient company, AI can also improve overall efficiency and support the development of new businesses. Döhler's current business design in around 130 countries, with different compliance requirements and thousands of product portfolios, is supported by AI to predict sales, automate financial postings by 20 percent, reduce tender management time by 50 percent, and help CIOs and CTOs build an IT architecture that can support business development.
"AI should be a strategic project for an enterprise, and CEOs should think about how to use AI to enable enterprises to have new growth, the right strategy, and better measures to reduce costs and increase efficiency in today's complex and highly competitive environment, which can lay the foundation for the next few years." Dr. Huang Chenhong said that the cases of commercial AI applications are only the tip of the iceberg, and many new applications are waiting for everyone to cooperate and innovate and develop.
For SAP, which has already shown its skills in the above cases, in the face of the current industry's doubts about the process of AI empowerment, the commercial AI under it also has full confidence.
The power behind business AI
In fact, SAP was the first company to come up with the concept of "business AI". SAP believes that business AI means that AI and an enterprise's business process and operation management are deeply integrated, fully mining and utilizing the data within the enterprise and the industry, releasing the value and potential of data, making the enterprise's decision-making and operation more excellent and intelligent, and making the business society more efficient.
In addition to the concept, SAP also said that it wants to become the world's No. 1 company in business AI. In the keynote speech session of the China Summit, Dr. Huang Chenhong also introduced the business AI framework behind the above-mentioned AI empowerment cases.
In this framework, as the first step, AI Foundation can provide AI technology as an AI foundation with ecosystem partners, whether it is generative AI or large language models, it can achieve adaptation, training, and collaboration.
The second step is to integrate AI functions into all SAP business processes, from cloud ERP to supply chain management, human resource management, support management, business networking, customer relationship management, and business platforms.
The third step is Joule, the intelligent co-pilot of business AI, as an AI that truly understands business, can deploy and plan related services through natural language interaction, and improve daily business efficiency.
When it comes to AI, especially for actual business, an unavoidable problem is how to avoid hallucination. Dr. Huang Chenhong responded to this question during the media group interview: "What to use to train it, this is the most critical thing, we use the core business data of the enterprise to train, and it is a real, real-time, accurate business data to train this model. ”
The strength of SAP Business AI lies in data. At present, the company has 450,000 customers worldwide, 94% of the world's top 500 customers, SAP supports 87% of the world's commercial trade, and is a veritable foundation for the operation of the global digital economy. It is reported that 27,000 customers around the world have authorized SAP to use their data for AI training through real, real-time and accurate business data, and 25,000 customers have begun to implement AI scenarios.
At the summit, the authors learned that many Chinese companies are also following up on the AI wave, which is closely related to another buzzword at the moment, namely "new quality productivity".
Develop new quality productive forces
"AI+" is one of the requirements for new quality productivity. "The concept of 'new quality productivity' is to use scientific and technological innovation to promote high-quality development. In the past few years, for SAP, the entire SAP system has helped enterprises to achieve high-quality development. Dr. Huang Chenhong said.
Here we might as well review the case of business AI empowerment, from which it is not difficult to find that enterprises need some prerequisites to do AI, such as a digital system, data integration, and application to the cloud. Only under this premise can AI be implemented. From the perspective of helping Chinese enterprises develop new quality productivity, SAP's first idea is to help enterprises transform into all-data smart enterprises, and one of the most important points is to accelerate ERP to the cloud. In the case of Döhler, a food and beverage ingredient company, if hundreds of thousands of employees did not use the same version of the support system via the cloud, it would be impossible to talk about subsequent AI innovations. "The most important thing is to move ERP to the cloud, so that we can really use AI." Dr. Huang Chenhong talked about the relationship in his speech.
At the beginning of 2021, SAP launched "RISE with SAP" to help ERP take the cloud to the top. In China, Bosideng has deployed RISE with SAP to make its operations more refined, real-time and integrated. Zhang Xiaoquan, a national time-honored brand, also managed its business through SAP ERP cloud, reducing inventory by 50% and delivery delay by 60%, achieving the second growth of the time-honored brand.
This year, SAP also launched the "2024 ERP Cloud Incentive Program" to help existing SAP ERP customers smoothly migrate their ERP to the cloud, enjoy the speed and level of innovation brought by the cloud, get the innovation empowerment from business AI, and always maintain security and compliance.
SAP's second idea is to help Chinese enterprises become global collaborative enterprises, and in response to the four major problems faced by enterprises, such as many compliance risks, difficult talent management, large system differences and poor supply chain resilience, SAP has released the "Global Operation Golden Key Plan 2.0", which is committed to helping customers open up the domestic and international dual circulation. The program provides a one-stop solution to solve the challenges of global management. Robust global data compliance support, supported in 45 languages around the world, ensures that customers in 190+ countries can comply with changing regulations in real time. At the same time, SAP's 10 management courses have been launched one after another, aiming to help enterprises master core competencies in global operations, including compliance and risk control, talent management, marketing management, supply chain collaboration, and sustainable development.
The third idea is to help Chinese enterprises become all-green and sustainable enterprises, SAP Green Ledger can help enterprises incorporate carbon data into the scope of enterprise resources, so that the "carbon data" of enterprises is real, transparent, calculable and auditable, and help enterprises effectively carry out carbon management. SAP announced that it has joined the Yabuli China Entrepreneur Forum's "Yabuli Zero Carbon Ambition Plan". Through this platform, SAP leverages cutting-edge technologies and six sustainable solutions to promote the integrated development of "people, finance, and carbon".
It is not difficult to see that SAP has not only accelerated the digitalization process of Chinese enterprises in the development of new quality productivity, but also laid a solid foundation for the deployment of business AI in the future. During this summit, Dr. Huang Chenhong expressed his desire to see more and more Chinese enterprises apply business AI more than once, and SAP "in China, for China" is also practicing to this end.