SAP SE and NVIDIA have just announced an expansion of their partnership that will enable enterprise customers to more quickly leverage the transformative power of data and generative AI across SAP’s cloud application and solution portfolio.
Both companies are collaborating to build and deliver SAP Business AI, including sector-specific and scalable generative AI capabilities both within the SAP co-pilot Joule and across SAP’s entire portfolio of cloud solutions and applications, all supported by the SAP Generative AI hub. The generative AI hub delivers relevant, reliable and responsible business AI and provides instant access to a wide range of large language models-also known as LLMs.
Collaboration is part of SAP’s initiative to incorporate generative AI directly into applications that drive businesses around the world, and aims to help clients adopt generative AI capabilities at scale and integrate them into their organizations. SAP will use NVIDIA’s Generative AI Foundry service to tailor LLMs to specific scenarios and deploy applications with the new NVIDIA NIM microservices. According to SAP and NVIDIA forecasts, new integrated capabilities will be available by the end of 2024.
“Our customers are looking for the benefits of the most advanced technology, which gives them real business value,” says Christian Klein, CEO and SAP SE Executive Board member. “Strategic technology alliances, such as that established between SAP and NVIDIA, are at the heart of our strategy to invest in technology that maximizes AI potential and opportunities for businesses. NVIDIA’s expertise in delivering AI capabilities at scale will help SAP accelerate the pace of transformation and better meet the needs of our cloud customers”.
“SAP is sitting on a gold mine of business data with the potential to transform into custom generative AI agents and collaborate with customers in automating their businesses,” explains Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Together, NVIDIA and SAP will bring personalized generative AI to the thousands of organizations around the world that rely on SAP to drive their operations”.
Leverage enterprise data and generative AI to expand customer knowledge
The goal of the SAP-NVIDIA collaboration is to integrate generative AI into SAP cloud solutions, which include the latest versions of the SAP Datasphere solution, SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) and RISE with SAP.
SAP aims to create additional generative AI functions within SAP BTP using NVIDIA’s Generative AI Foundry service, which includes NVIDIA DGX’s supercomputing AI, Cloud, NVIDIA AI Enterprise software and NVIDIA AI Foundation models. These new features are designed to be the foundation of SAP’s generative AI development and deployment, and are expected to be available at the generative AI center in SAP AI Core and SAP Datasphere.
New generative AI features developed by SAP and NVIDIA include:
- New capabilities for the Joule co-pilot: Joule can take advantage of the enhanced generation-by-recovery (RAG) capabilities built by NVIDIA and SAP, that can be deployed in major hyperscalers or in SAP’s own cloud environments. As a generative AI copilot in natural language, Joule helps customers unlock and leverage the full potential of their business by automating time-consuming tasks and quickly analyzing critical data to deliver smarter, more personalized experiences.
- Innovative use cases leveraging SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Signavio: SAP and NVIDIA are exploring more than 20 generative AI use cases where companies can combine assets to simplify and improve digital transformation. These include generative AI functions that allow:
-Automate enterprise resource planning with intelligent invoice adjustment in SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
-Improve human resource use cases by leveraging SAP SuccessFactors.
-Accelerate new insights into SAP Signavio generative AI to better process business recommendations and streamline SAP customer support processes.
- Unifying AI data sources with SAP Datasphere: built on SAP BTP, SAP Datasphere enables both integration and a unified view of semantically rich SAP data with third-party data for the entire organization. This unification aims to help customers adapt more quickly to market changes and make more efficient and better informed decisions. With SAP Datasphere, customers can confidently access high-quality data using AI and machine learning (ML) models. In addition, to accelerate SAP’s federated machine learning (FedML) capabilities for SAP Datasphere, NVIDIA and SAP are working on providing data scientists easier access to their own data and improving ML workload performance with the support of NVIDIA accelerated computing platforms and NVIDIA AI Enterprise data science software such as NVIDIA RAPIDS RAPIDS cuDF and cuML.
- Using LLM for the ABAP programming language: To help developers create domain-specific language code, SAP plans to use NVIDIA AI Foundry services to help fine-tune LLM accuracy. This will be based on SAP’s use of generative AI models to help developers using ABAP through the company’s ABAP Cloud model and the SAP Cloud Application Programming model.
NVIDIA AI Enterprise empowers production-grade generative AI in SAP cloud solutions
Once models are ready for deployment in SAP cloud solutions, the German company plans to also use NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, including NIM inference microservices and NVIDIA NeMo Retriever microservices.
NVIDIA NIM can be used to accelerate and maximize inference performance across SAP accelerated infrastructure. Using NVIDIA NeMo Retriever microservices, SAP plans to add RAG features that allow generative AI applications to more securely access data running in SAP software to improve their accuracy and depth. Customers can use RAG with both SAP and third-party data.
