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Oct. 15, 2024
SAP TechEd 2024 provided a deep dive into how SAP continues to innovate and transform industries by leveraging generative AI, automation, data analytics, and cutting-edge development tools. Here, we explore the top 10 takeaways that highlight the key advancements and opportunities presented at this year's conference, helping businesses unlock their potential and stay competitive in an evolving digital landscape.
In recent years, generative AI has made a significant impact on businesses, reshaping how industries function and innovate. At SAP TechEd 2024, the focus was on the practical application of AI rather than the technology itself. The potential of generative AI lies in how businesses use it to enhance their capabilities. Much like the NZT-48 pill in the movie Limitless, generative AI can act as a powerful tool to accelerate innovation and expand possibilities.
SAP’s Business Technology Platform (BTP) has played a crucial role in this shift, offering a comprehensive ecosystem that integrates AI advancements. With BTP's seamless integration of AI services, organizations now have access to capabilities that were unimaginable just a couple of years ago. SAP has created a foundation for AI-driven transformation, allowing companies to achieve real, tangible business outcomes through intelligent applications and process automation.
At its core, SAP’s Business Technology Platform (BTP) enables companies to build, integrate, and scale applications with ease. Originally known as the SAP Cloud Platform, BTP has evolved into a powerful unified platform that brings together essential components such as application development, automation, integration, data, analytics, and AI.
This year's TechEd emphasized the platform’s ability to empower over 27,000 customers and 2,800 partners to drive innovation and growth. With BTP, businesses can quickly adapt to the ever-changing market demands, foster innovation, and scale their operations to stay ahead of competitors. Whether it’s automating workflows, leveraging data for insights, or developing AI-driven applications, BTP provides a solid foundation to meet today’s business challenges.
SAP’s AI Foundation represents a strong commitment to delivering AI technologies that are relevant, reliable, and responsible. At TechEd 2024, SAP unveiled key enhancements that further reinforce this ethos:
Relevant: SAP has built an extensive portfolio of AI services that can be easily integrated into SAP applications. From AI lifecycle management to business content integration, these services provide contextual relevance for businesses to streamline processes and improve decision-making.
Reliable: With the introduction of SAP Gen AI Hub, businesses can now rely on robust orchestration tools, such as data masking and content filtering, to ensure accurate and trustworthy outputs from large language models (LLMs). These tools help mitigate the risks of AI hallucinations while maintaining the reliability of the AI systems.
Responsible: SAP announced that it will host Mistral Large 2, the newest LLM, in its own data centers. This step ensures complete control over data privacy and security, removing the need for external APIs and reducing the risk of data exposure.
Joule, SAP’s intelligent co-pilot, continues to evolve as it celebrates its first anniversary. With over 500 skills available across HR, finance, sales, supply chain, and more, Joule is transforming how businesses handle common workflows. By the end of 2024, Joule is expected to reach 1,200 skills, significantly increasing its capabilities.
Some exciting new updates for Joule include:
Multi-Language Support: Joule now supports multiple languages, making it accessible to a global audience.
Expanded Infrastructure: SAP has increased its data center capacity to support Joule’s growing user base.
Joule Studio: Developers can now access ABAP tools in Joule Studio, enabling over two million ABAP developers worldwide to create custom extensions and applications.
The future of Joule lies in specialized agents designed for specific domains like HR and customer service. These Joule Agents will allow businesses to create custom skills and integrate with other enterprise apps, boosting business efficiency and automation.
SAP Build has undergone major enhancements, enabling developers to build applications more efficiently. This year, SAP introduced ABAP Cloud, a low-code environment powered by AI models trained on millions of lines of ABAP code. This empowers developers to build powerful extensions for S/4HANA while keeping the system’s core clean.
With On-Stack and Side-by-Side development options, ABAP Cloud provides flexibility for both private and public cloud environments. The new ABAP Cloud Extensibility Wizard allows key users and developers to create extensions with ease, ensuring that applications remain lifecycle-compliant and adaptive to future innovations.
With the explosion of generative AI, data management has become more important than ever. SAP’s HANA Cloud Vector Engine and Knowledge Graph Engine are essential tools for organizing and processing vast amounts of enterprise data.
HANA Cloud Vector Engine enables in-database vectorization and makes it easier to create vector embeddings for LLMs, improving the accuracy of AI-driven outputs. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is a notable use case, where the engine retrieves relevant business data to enhance AI predictions and recommendations.
Knowledge Graph Engine helps organize enterprise data into interconnected facts, enabling advanced question-answering systems for domain-specific queries. By combining structured data from manuals, documents, and records, businesses can generate accurate and context-aware responses.
SAP TechEd 2024 also showcased major improvements in analytics through SAP Datasphere and SAP Analytics Cloud.
SAP Analytics Cloud Compass will be available in early 2025, providing business users with risk modeling capabilities through Monte Carlo simulation. This allows non-technical users to perform complex risk analyses without prior expertise.
SAP Datasphere introduced new features such as embedded data lake capabilities and Spark Data Processing, enabling organizations to store and process large datasets more efficiently.
Integration remains a cornerstone of SAP’s offering. SAP Integration Suite has introduced AI-powered optimization features, allowing businesses to optimize their existing integrations with AI-generated recommendations. Additionally, SAP has launched a Starter Edition of the Integration Suite, offering pre-packaged integrations for SAP SuccessFactors and SAP GROW customers.
Business transformation is at the forefront of SAP’s vision for the future. By integrating LeanIX, Signavio, and WalkMe, SAP provides businesses with a seamless process for application discovery, business process design, and user adoption. These tools support critical areas like employee onboarding, performance management, and business operations, ensuring organizations can navigate digital transformation with ease.
At TechEd, SAP demonstrated how generative AI can be used across various applications with a fictional company, TeachIT Technologies. From project management to global expansion, TeachIT’s use of SAP’s Cloud ERP, Sales Cloud, and compliance tools showcased how AI can transform business operations. These real-world use cases provided a glimpse into how businesses can streamline operations, manage teams, and expand internationally using SAP’s AI-powered tools.
SAP TechEd 2024 solidified SAP’s position as a leader in AI, data management, and business transformation. By enhancing its Business Technology Platform and introducing groundbreaking AI-powered tools, SAP continues to empower businesses to innovate, scale, and thrive in the digital age. Whether it’s through intelligent co-pilots like Joule, advanced analytics, or seamless integrations, SAP is equipping businesses with the tools they need to unlock the full potential of AI and drive meaningful change.
