SAP sees faster route to creating value from AI and analytics

As business across the supply chain sector launch “digitalization” efforts to transform their operations from manual to automated processes, enterprise software vendor SAP says it has a way to accelerate that process by taking better advantage of the data that every company generates.

The approach hinges on SAP’s announcement last week that it would expand its relationship with Google Cloud, building an “open data offering” designed to simplify data landscapes by letting users access data from many different sources in a single place. That step is significant because data is the cornerstone of all digital transformation and artificial intelligence (AI) development projects, SAP said today at its Sapphire user conference in Orlando.

According to SAP, organizations spend significant resources building complex data integrations, custom analytics engines, and generative AI and natural language processing (NLP) models before they start to realize value from their data investments. Data is among organizations’ most valuable assets and can contain critical information on core functions like supply chains, financial forecasting, human resources records, and omnichannel retail. 

SAP says its “Datasphere” platform combines this mission-critical data with data from across the enterprise landscape, regardless of its origin. Being able to combine SAP software data and non-SAP data on Google Cloud from virtually any other data source means organizations can dramatically accelerate their digital transformation with a fully defined data foundation that retains complete business context, the company said.

And that process will help products like Generative AI solutions to become more infused into customer operations for more powerful analytics and stronger decision-making solutions. Applying tools like AI and machine learning can also render more meaningful data insights and make decisions more quickly and with higher confidence, SAP said.