Kathy Gibson is at Saphila Transcend in Sun City – Change has always been a constant – but in the last couple of years digital transformation has been moving at a faster pace than ever before.
This is because, today, technology is transforming transformation, says Timo Elliott, vice-president and global innovation analyst at SAP.
And today, transformative technology is all about artificial intelligence (AI).
“Experts agree that AI is the third great wave of technology after the personal computer (PC) in the 1980s and the Internet in the 1990s,” Elliott says.
“But if you are not careful, waves can come crashing down on top of you. AI is very powerful, and can have unintended consequences.”
Although it is most obvious in the visual context, AI is progressing in all directions, Elloitt points out. “The process of rapid technological change and disruption is coming to your industry and your line of business.”
Today, what’s holding up AI disruption is the fact that the rest of the ecosystem isn’t able to change as quickly.
“It’s a bit like parachuting a Formula 1 car into a medieval village. You can’t use the technology because the rest of the ecosystem isn’t there.
“in fact, if AI stopped progressing right now, we couldn’t use it to its full potential for 10 years.”
For this reason, Elliott says AI could be taken to stand for accelerate innovation. “We should use AI to adopt AI.”
Today, a lot of AI and innovation in general is handmade, with developers all starting from scratch and working on one thing.
“To accelerate the adoption, we need to move to modern assembly lines, so we can use the AI faster,” Elliott says.
He adds that SAP provides the machines to build the technology.
“We offer things like the SAP Business Technology Platform, where customers create data that is harmonised in the Business Data Cloud, used to ground AI, which then goes to making a better application. And, as you create applications, you can add customisation.”
SAP embeds AI in all its applications, and these are available to customers right now, Elliott adds.
“But innovation is not actually about technology,” he explains. “What is holding us back is the time, skills, and resources needed to exploit the technology.”
Again, the SAP Business Technology Platform can help, with SAP Build offering aided innovation – another possible use for AI – for agile application development and customisation.
“We have the resources that can multiply efforts, let developers do more, faster, with customisations and extensions in the cloud.
“And now you can do it in natural language, because it is designed for professional developers and also business users.”
AI could also stand for automated identity, Elliott says.
And it could represent automatic integration as well. “SAP Integration Suite is about AI-powered connections. It will do most of the heavy lifting in connecting system to one another.”
Meanwhile, the SAP BTP AI Foundation is a generative AI (GenAI) hub that gives customers everything they need to orchestrate customised AI, with a wide choice of models, grounding, data masking, filtering, prompt management, and lifecycle management.
At the core of any transformation is data, which is everyone recognises is important. “In fact, it is really important,” Elliott says. “It is the essential input for AI in particular.
“So AI has to stand for accurate information. AI is useless without accurate information in realtime.”
But there isn’t a company on the planet that doesn’t have a data quality problem, he adds.
“It is not a new problem, we know it’s hard to get budget to fix data. But this is an opportunity to ask for money to do just that. Now is a great time to establish governance, data ownership, and all the things you have wanted to do for years.”
The second big problem is integrating data – which is also not a new problem.
“This is where SAP Business Data Cloud comes in,” Elliott says. “And we offer it as a service, so we can do more of it for you – integrate data from SAP applications and also external data.”
The SAP Knowledge Graph helps with relationship extraction. “You already have this information, now we are gathering it and exposing it, and putting it in a format that you can use for your AI,” Elliott explains.
AI could also represent analytics improved, which is why SAP Analytics Cloud has the GenAI-powered Just Ask feature.
“In analytics, there is a dream of total situational awareness. Of bringing in data from all sources, but having overall vision. AI can be used to connect data and deal with fuzziness.”
AI could also stand for agents incoming. “This is the next generation of AI, moving along from the current efficient processes with pre-defined steps. But these processes can’t deal with ambiguity. Agents, on the other hand, can reason through what it needs to do next. So the processes and data can be a lot more unstructured than before.”
Another interpretation of AI could be agents for business, Elliott adds. “This is the next evolutionary step – in fact, some companies are already doing it – using AI to get rid of a lot of manual work.”
AI could be used for automatic innovation. “We have incredible amounts of information and amazing intelligence,” says Elliott. “So why not let the systems tell us what we should do next?
“We are starting to get there, and you can already get great automated system insights. And SAP also has best practices, so we can provide customers with that out of the box.”
Once that is in place, and customers need to implement their systems, automated implementation could be the final meaning for AI.
“Of course, technology is not everything,” Elliott points out. “You need to get people to adopt new ways of working – and AI is good for adoption optimisation and change management.”
In conclusion, Elliott believes that AI today is like a staircase. “You have to take one step after the other. But in the future it will be more like an escalator.”
The key to successful AI adoption lies not in the technology he adds, but in the people, culture, and organisation.
“No matter how much you have invested in adoption, culture, and change management – invest more.”