SAP Unveils Comprehensive AI Offerings at Its TechEd Event

SAP showcased the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) and announced a series of generative AI features for developers and business users at its TechEd event. One of the highlights is SAP Build Code, a version of the enterprise resource planning giant's Build low-code development platform specifically designed for software professionals. It incorporates AI-based productivity tools optimized for Java and JavaScript development. It utilizes the code generated by the company's generative AI partner, Joule, which was launched in September, for data modeling, application logic, and test script creation. SAP stated that SAP Build Code aims to improve collaboration between business users and professional developers using Build. It connects to SAP and third-party software data and systems and enables developers to create applications and processes without losing the business context. The new development tool also interoperates with the ABAP Cloud development model for cloud-ready business applications and offers governance and lifecycle management capabilities. The second major release this week is the support for vector database processing in HANA Cloud. HANA is a column-based in-memory database management system that can run advanced analytics in transactions. A vector database is a type of database specifically designed to store, manage, and query vector data, which is a set of values commonly used to represent features in machine learning, spatial coordinates in geographic information systems, or multidimensional data. Unlike exact matching, vector databases allow searching based on similar vectors. SAP provided an example of searching for suppliers based on contract language. This capability is widely used in AI applications such as image recognition, natural language processing, and recommendation systems. Juergen Mueller, SAP's Chief Technology Officer, said, "This is important because all large language models have an expiration date. They are trained using certain data, but they don't have the latest or company-specific data. Vector databases can provide more context. We are getting closer to the holy grail of generative AI, combining the advantages of large language models with real-time company data." Another AI initiative for developers is AI Foundation, a toolkit that allows developers to create extensions and applications using AI and generative AI on the SAP Business Technology Platform. BTP provides enterprise management capabilities such as database security, encryption, and governance. SAP stated that AI Foundation includes everything developers need to create applications like intelligent document recognition and machine translation on BTP, including pre-packaged AI services, access to popular large language models, vector database capabilities, and AI runtime and lifecycle management. Today, SAP also launched role-based authentication for backend developers using the ABAP Cloud development model. The related learning resources aim to help developers build the skills needed to create cloud-ready extensions consistent with SAP's "clean core" practice, which aims to minimize customization and modification of the core ERP system. New learning resources for ABAP development tools on SAP BTP and SAP S/4HANA are now available on the SAP Learning website. Dozens of other announcements are planned for this week, including improvements to the SAP Discovery Center, a Java version of the open-source SAP Cloud software development kit, a new cloud logging service, containerized runtime options for the SAP Integration Suite, and generative AI features for developers looking to build AI extensions using the ABAP programming language. The complete list of TechEd announcements can be found in the TechEd News Guide.