Announcing Joule, its version of a natural-language AI copilot that will be integrated with SAP's enterprise software tools this week, SAP has joined the party of generative AI digital assistants with the announcement that it will be joining the generative AI digital assistant party. The SAP company claims that Joule will allow people to do their work more quickly and therefore make their businesses more successful.  

With SAP Joule, a platform for creating AI-powered copilots based on the SAP Business Technology Platform, SAP is at the forefront of the business technology revolution that involves artificial intelligence (AI) at the core of business processes. 

As it is intended to enhance user productivity as well as enable better business outcomes through intelligent SAP Business AI functionality, it also provides contextualized insights and task automation functionality for end-users. Achieving the goal of empowering users with the power to take control of their own experiences by providing an AI assistant, SAP Joule can help users navigate complex tasks easily. This is SAP's fifth year of all-encompassing foray into the world of customer experience software on the heels of its successful career in the database management, ERP, and back-end enterprise software fields. 

As part of SAP's new advanced customer experience suite, the company now offers its latest generative artificial intelligence features, designed to streamline marketing and customer service processes and provide businesses with detailed insights that can help them deliver a more personalized service to customers. 

As a matter of fact, AI is only as good as the data that powers it, and for that reason, companies should make sure that their ERP systems are integrated deeply in order to make it possible for operations data to be seamlessly integrated into customer experiences. This was explained by Sven Denecken, the SVP of marketing and solutions for SAP Industries & Customer Experience, in an interview with CMSWire. 

As SAP has the unique ability to deliver more personalized experiences for customers and better individualised decision-making and profitability for businesses through the use of artificial intelligence, it is capable of pulling data and insights from SAP's ecosystem and third-party sources. 

With the newly introduced features, an assortment of sectors like commerce, sales, customer service, and marketing will be able to take advantage of these features: 

The role-based AI tools are designed to enhance productivity via the automation of routine tasks. There have been over ten tools available to enhance productivity. AI can for instance provide a quick summary of customer issues, suggest probable solutions, and monitor how long it takes to resolve the issue. 

Enhance catalogue management: By using AI to review product tags and catalogues, generate product descriptions, and guide customers to the right product for them, commerce managers will be able to ensure a high level of visibility and discoverability of their products. 

Providing intelligent Q&A features allows for rapid identification of customer queries, as well as prompt response to them. 

Intelligent customer profiles provide SAP's customers with an accurate 360-degree view of their personal and business needs so that they can interact with SAP in a way that is more tailored to their needs.

In order to be able to answer a question or pose a problem to SAP Business Intelligence, users can use plain language in order to address the question or frame the problem as they see fit. Joule was used as an example by SAP to demonstrate how the company could identify underperforming regions in the supply chain, link to other data sets that reveal issues with the supply chain, and offer potential solutions to the issue automatically by connecting with the supply chain system. An HR manager could use this tool to generate relevant interview questions and unbiased job descriptions in order to create an unbiased interview process. 

With the introduction of artificial intelligence-driven risk-based authentication capabilities into SAP's Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) solutions, SAP is enhancing its CIMAM solutions. By gathering intelligence across all digital touchpoints, these innovations strengthen the security of end-user identity data and help to prevent threats. SAP officials claim that this ensures that customer information remains secure and confidential, which is a key component of maintaining the trust of customers. 

By using the SAP Emarsys Customer Engagement platform, which includes Generative AI, marketers can produce targeted email content that resonates with their target audience as part of the customer engagement process. In addition to these features, there will be new generative AI features introduced into SAP Sales Cloud and SAP Service Cloud, including AI-generated summaries and email response generation, to assist users in pinpointing relevant information and enhancing customer relations.  

Using his Intelligent CX strategy as a springboard for the future, Denecken highlighted SAP's strategy of offering industry-specific, AI-infused customer experience solutions. There are four pillars to SAP's Intelligent CX strategy: industry-tailored, connected, insightful, and adaptive. SAP intends to unlock value by providing differentiated, industry-tailored, AI-infused solutions that enable customers to unlock greater value from their businesses.

Throughout the announcement, SAP was keen to point out that Joule builds upon its existing AI offerings, and that the SAP Business AI platform can already be accessed across multiple scenarios and by partners for more than 26,000 SAP cloud customers.  

With its wide range of products and customer base, the vendor is well-positioned to succeed with this new generative AI play. It has been estimated that nearly 300 million enterprise users regularly utilize the cloud solutions of the company, as stated by the firm's CEO Christian Klein. Joule is taking a narrow approach rather than a general one, focusing on specific job roles and functions rather than broad-based functions.  

This particular type of AI assistant is quite similar to the ones introduced by rival vendors. For example, Salesforce has recently begun testing its own AI assistant called Einstein Copilot. Similarly, Freshworks has developed its own version called Freddy Copilot, which is currently being used by around 390 beta customers. Furthermore, Microsoft has integrated its AI assistant, Copilot, with its employee engagement product known as Viva. 

During the recent press launch event, Saueressig highlighted the fact that SAP has been actively involved in AI research for several years now. He further mentioned that the company has already implemented over 130 AI cases with its customers, and has made more than 360 partner apps with AI capabilities available in the SAP app store.