AI Agents: SAP is working on AI agents to increase productivity

SAP, the largest technology company in Europe by market value, is the latest major brand that is in the process of developing artificial intelligence agents, i.e. artificial intelligence capable of performing complex actions.

“We are actively working on this technology,” SAP’s chief AI strategy officer, Sean Kask, told ET. “In public research and internal testing, we see promising results from integrating AI agent workflows and multi-agent systems with SAP solutions and our Joule co-pilot.”

Kask identified anomaly or encounter notification, decision support through, for example, retrieving and comparing business documents to solve a problem, and task automation as areas where AI agents can have a business impact.

“As productivity growth slows and companies struggle with talent shortages, AI agents are one application of AI that can increase productivity beyond the capabilities of even current AI software and technology,” Kask said.

The company focuses on business AI solutions. It recently announced that it will publish 100 use cases for generative AI embedded in its products by the end of 2024. It is also working on its own basic artificial intelligence model, a beta version of which may be made available later this year, Kask says.

Kask said AI agents would bring significant benefits to the business by assisting with more diverse, complex processes that require planning and reflection, as well as accessing tools such as SAP systems and calendars, and even collaborating with other agents.

In comparison, existing large-language applications like ChatGPT are mainly good for a single task, such as suggesting a reply to an email, Kask noted. For example, if a user wants to schedule a meeting with a customer, they can simply type “Find when I need to be at the customer’s site and plan travel” to the agent, who can scan calendars and emails to determine the meeting time, check the customer’s address in the CRM system, and access a travel solution such as SAP Concur to propose an itinerary – all while taking into account the company’s travel policy, Kask said.

“While many companies are experimenting with AI agents, SAP’s goal is to bring AI capabilities to thousands of companies at scale in their core processes,” he said.

However, he added that the features will only be made available when they comply with SAP’s enterprise product and reliability standards and ethical principles.

Microsoft, Google and Salesforce are among the big tech players working on AI agents.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that while it’s still early, the company is working on agent use cases, such as returning an online order or helping a user explore a city or find services, where AI can think many steps ahead and act in line with their expectations. behalf.

Earlier this year, Microsoft introduced agent capabilities for its genAI Copilot assistant bot to run business processes and related tasks.