SAP to offer IBM Watson AI capabilities in its solutions

German software firm SAP has announced plans to leverage IBM Watson AI to generate new insights and offer new automated experiences to customers of its enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions.

SAP said its digital assistant SAP Start, which allows users to search, launch, and interact with apps provided by SAP and SAM Cloud, is one of the solutions which will use IBM Watson. 

The new AI capabilities in SAP Start will help boost productivity with natural language capabilities and predictive insights, the company claims. 

“This collaboration with IBM aims to provide SAP customers with a better user experience, faster decision-making, and greater insights to help transform their business processes. Working together to incorporate additional AI, machine learning and other intelligent technologies into SAP solutions can lead to better business outcomes for our joint customers,” said Christian Klein, CEO and executive board member of SAP SE.

Further, SAP said that the new digital assistant capabilities in SAP Start will be extended to other SAP solutions for answering queries by managers and employees. SAP Start will allow customers to extract information from a variety of data sources and answer user questions across business lines using AI and machine learning. The company hopes to automate and speed up common tasks and shift the focus of human workers to more strategic tasks. 

“IBM and SAP are joining forces to give businesses new and exciting ways to harness the transformative power of AI and use it as a source of competitive advantage. With this announcement, we are infusing IBM Watson’s powerful, enterprise-grade AI capabilities into SAP’s leading ERP platform to help businesses reimagine customer experiences, boost productivity, and fuel growth,” said Arvind Krishna, chairman, and CEO of IBM.

In addition to this announcement, SAP and IBM are also collaborating on generative AI and large language models to deliver automation based on SAP’s mission-critical application suite.

SAP Concur TripIt mobile app also leverages IBM Watson to offer AI-derived weather insights to 13 million users to help them make more sustainable travel choices.