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Cue the awkward icebreakers—there’s a new AI in the office.
SAP is the latest enterprise giant looking to bring large language models (LLMs) to the workplace with a new digital assistant. “Joule” will thread through the company’s various software programs, which span areas like finance, HR, and customer experience, to field business-specific questions in natural language, help with coding, and write short bits of text, SAP said in its announcement.
The company isn’t the first enterprise software maker to think along these lines. This spring, Salesforce rolled out Einstein GPT as part of its push to weave generative AI through all its operations, and Microsoft unveiled a workplace-specific Copilot AI earlier this year. But with nearly 300 million users worldwide, SAP’s foray could go a ways toward making AI more ubiquitous in offices of all kinds.
SAP provided examples like users asking why certain regions are underperforming in sales and receiving supply chain data, generating an “unbiased” job description, or handling business travel accommodations.
Many irons in the fire: The news builds on some of the investments that SAP has made across the generative AI space in recent months.
The company announced a series of investments of undisclosed amounts in LLM providers Aleph Alpha, Anthropic, and Cohere in July, and inked partnerships with Microsoft, Google Cloud, and IBM in May. SAP-backed Sapphire Ventures has also pledged to invest $1 billion in enterprise AI startups.
Pick-and-choose models: SAP’s Joule will draw on different language models for different purposes, depending on the specific use case and how well a given model might perform at it, according to information provided by email as part of the announcement.
Stephen Kurily, a spokesperson for SAP, told us the company won’t use customer information to train the underlying models, but could use it to further fine-tune each customer’s own AI systems in what he says is a secure environment.
Joule will roll out to parts of SAP’s enterprise portfolio—SAP SuccessFactors solutions and the SAP Start site—later this year, and to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition, in early 2024, followed by other parts of the SAP portfolio.