As AI continues to gain momentum, more businesses are looking to capture that momentum and turn it into value. At this point, we’re seeing high levels of adoption on an individual employee level in the form of experimentation, and many customers are looking to take the next step toward transforming their processes and approach to talent. In a time when workforce development, continuous learning, and employee well-being are the centerpiece for organizational success, the integration of AI into day-to-day workflows and talent management offers even more opportunities for companies to thrive.
As I mentioned in my article for Forbes, there are different levels of AI adoption:
- Phase zero: Learn and experiment to discover opportunities for individual efficiencies and impact.
- Phase one: Put tools in place across your organization to create some level of efficiency; most of these tools will be off the shelf. These are internally focused and specific to individual productivity, not team-focused tools.
- Phase two: Evaluate your business processes, workflows and use cases to determine which larger toolsets are right for team-focused efficiencies.
- Phase three: Start integrating generative AI and other tools into your technology landscape to create even larger efficiencies at the organizational level.
- Phase four: Start creating innovations, go to market and sell to your customers.
Thus, the first question you must ask is whether you’re trying to move from phase zero to phase one, or from one to two. And how does your answer vary based on which tasks or functional areas you’ve applied these AI solutions to so far? This is a key place where people get stuck as they try to figure out a next move that makes sense, knowing they need to scale.
How SAP will impact business processes with AI
SAP created the term Business AI to refer to many different aspects of its technology, whether it’s their Gen AI tool, Joule, or other embedded tools that have been a part of their system for a long time. Because this term is broad, it gives us a foundation to discuss anything from machine learning and predictive analytics to generative AI and foundation models. It helps us wrap our heads around a very large topic and apply what we know to the things we still need to learn, and possibly learn a little faster. For example, if we know that the ultimate goal is to grow our revenue, profits and people, then it becomes easier to zero in on the specific areas where we need to increase efficiencies and scale, and where, or how, we can improve the human experience.
The future of AI in software is poised to revolutionize business processes in several key ways. Specific to SAP, it is at the center of their strategy for empowering customers like you. However, it is not a stand-alone solution. It is being integrated into every part of the SAP portfolio to power core business processes and connect finance, supply chain, procurement, sales, marketing, human resources, and IT.
Here are a few examples of what is possible right now:
1. Faster access to data that is specific to your business
Both Gartner and IDC have released studies highlighting the inefficiencies created by employees looking for information. Gartner says 47% of employees struggle to find the right data1 they need to do their job, and IDC says that a digital worker spends about 2.5 hours per day looking for information2. Now think about the efficiencies gained with an AI-powered SAP landscape where employees get answers to their questions from a tool that is trained in the context of your business data and processes. You gain more than just efficiency because the information they’re getting back is more likely to be accurate and not the generic output of a publicly accessible AI tool. Beyond efficiency, this pays dividends in two ways. First, if your employees will have a better work experience and be able to make more meaningful contributions, which in turn will support retention and development. Second, the combination of your people and technology will help you create better customer experiences.
If we’re going to use AI to its greatest effect, then the investments we make in our technology must serve our people and our purpose to their greatest effect so that our businesses are run with the utmost care from the ground up.
2. Empowering others can actually give you better control of outcomes
Successful outcomes are obviously made up of many components. However, one key component is empowering your people by giving them the right tools and environment with appropriate risk protection. SAP Business AI will enable SAP’s applications to self-learn and to improve and optimize business outcomes while still adhering to role-based access controls that protect sensitive data. At the same time, they can pose plain-language questions to generate the reports and insights they need to accomplish their tasks more efficiently and make better decisions without having to be experts in your data’s structure or business processes.
These are the tools designed to help you as a leader to create a culture where empowered employees solve real problems and find areas for improvement or innovation that you couldn’t see from your vantage point. In short, you are removing roadblocks and giving people the ability to take on tasks that you previously felt you didn’t have the budget or headcount for due to cost pressures or other constraints.
3. You can leverage AI without compromising the value of your human talent
Even with AI-powered tools, humans still play a key role in business decision-making and generating growth. That will not go away, even if day-to-day tasks look different. The whole point of any technology is to serve people so that they can focus on things that matter, like adding more value to your business. The most common roadblocks to adding more value to any business are related to data and the need for processes that scale. When you save time and money in one area, you can redirect those resources to deliver more value where it is needed. Whether you’re automating invoice matching or using these tools to create convenient services for your customers, your people and technology are what drive you forward. And your people are the ones forming the relationships with customers and prospects that will ultimately drive business, which is especially important in a competitive environment where the commoditization of products and services becomes all too common.
4. What does this really look like in action?
There are a wide range of use cases within SAP including question answering, text generation, classification and summarization, or code generation. Here are some examples across a few different functional areas:
- Finance: The cash application automates accounts receivables with the help of machine learning.
- Sales: Automate your sales order creation process by having all incoming purchase orders scanned and all fields in the sales order request automatically filled.
- Procurement: Supplier invoices are automatically processed using a document information extraction service.
- Service: SAP’s intelligent resource management solutions find the right resource based on skill and availability.
The future impact on employee engagement and your business
As AI continues to evolve the way we live our lives and run our businesses, we have a unique opportunity to promote the well-being of employees beyond learning and development. Through predictive analytics and assessing factors such as workload, engagement levels, and job satisfaction, we can proactively implement measures to improve workplace culture. This in turn will help you maintain momentum for employee collaborations and innovations because you won’t have to drive everything thanks to your employees’ engagement.
That’s a promising future. But we don’t get there in one step and it still must align with your purpose and overall strategy for growth. Going back to the phases for AI adoption listed above, phase one is the tipping point for aligning your AI strategy with your purpose. As people get more time back in their day thanks to automating mundane, repetitive or low-value tasks, this is the opportunity for your people to spend more time creating things that add value and that customers will buy. Their capabilities to continue to do this are only enhanced at the rate by which we develop them and care for their well-being, whether it’s providing opportunities for advancement or preventing burnout. Given the right environment, they will create more opportunities for us to continue to reinvent ourselves and remain relevant than we ever could on our own.
