Packed audiences at , both onsite in Bangalore as well as attending virtually worldwide, had plenty to cheer about when ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ CTO and Executive Board Member Juergen Mueller stepped onto the stage this year to announce the company’s bold vision to be the leading business AI company by 2025.
In an interview, Mueller shares ·èÅÄ´«Ã½â€™s amazing generative AI journey with partners and customers that’s supercharging generative AI development and how companies operate.
Q: What are the top three things that developers, IT professionals, and business leaders need to know about the at ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ TechEd 2023?
A: First, we want every ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ ecosystem developer to become an AI developer and we are rolling out new tools, leveraging generative AI, to help them build and deploy intelligent data applications at scale.
Second, we are simplifying interactions between large language models (LLMs), enabling developers to implement intelligent data for generative AI applications. By expanding ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ HANA Cloud database capabilities with a vector engine, developers can combine the generic LLMs and gain the context they need with company-specific real-time data.Â
Third, is the choice for infusing ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ and partner applications with AI. By embedding generative AI into our solutions and giving developers, partners, and customers access to all our technology and learnings through ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ BTP, ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ is the go-to partner for business AI and generative AI-powered enterprise applications. We already have 22,000 live ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ BTP customers in the cloud.
Lastly, our ecosystem is critical for all our efforts to provide our customers with beneficial innovations for their digital transformation. We have 2,100 partners on ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ BTP, and there are 2,000 innovative partner solutions on the today. More than 360 of these solutions offer AI capabilities that drive business value.
Can you give us a snapshot of the major announcements this year?
Each of these advancements reflects ·èÅÄ´«Ã½â€™s commitment to become the No. 1 generative AI enterprise application ecosystem together with our partners and supported by our platform, ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ BTP.
- ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Build Code offers AI-powered productivity tools for developers. It’s an exciting evolution of the ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ BTP low-code solution that we launched last year. Our unified lobby of tools enables enhanced collaboration between citizen developers, professional developers, and IT departments. Developers will be able to create new applications or extensions for ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ solutions using our generative AI assistant Joule to generate code, create data models, and test data for applications.
- New vector capabilities for ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ HANA Cloud allow developers to enrich business data with unstructured data including text, images, and audio. This is a unique offering from ·èÅÄ´«Ã½, as customers will be able to combine the intelligence of LLMs with their business-specific data to provide accurate, relevant, and insightful responses. is the database management foundation of ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ BTP.
- AI Foundation on ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ BTP is our one-stop-shop for developers to build business-ready AI applications and extensions on ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ BTP. From ready-to-use AI services to AI runtimes and lifecycle management, we’re providing the tools developers need to manage enterprise-grade generative AI with security, governance, and trust. As part of AI Foundation we will also include a generative AI hub in ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ AI Core to provide developers with instant access to a broad range of LLMs from different providers.
- Learning is foundational to ·èÅÄ´«Ã½â€™s ambitious goal to upskill 2 million professionals by 2025. Our newly announced role-based certification for ABAP Cloud back-end developers will drive expert skillset growth for agile cloud business transformation. Moreover, we’ve supplemented the with a new , which explains how to build and implement business applications on ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ BTP.
How do ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ solutions help developers, data scientists, business users, and other professionals power their personal success and organization’s growth?
·èÅÄ´«Ã½ is already at the forefront of generative AI advancements. Over 24,000 cloud customers are actively using more than 130 AI scenarios built on ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ BTP. We have the business data, processes, and customer relationships, and we believe that most business AI capabilities will be consumed in an embedded way.
·èÅÄ´«Ã½â€™s unique access to business data and our industry depth — together with our foundation in ethics, data privacy, compliance, and security — mean that we’re able to deliver unparalleled automation and seamless human-machine collaboration capabilities to our customers.
Most important, ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Business AI is relevant, reliable, and responsible. In our trusted environment, people are creating relevant AI use cases in the context of their organization’s real-world business processes and embedded into their daily ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ systems. These use cases are reliable because they’re based on an understanding of both the business data and what it means within the business process.
Finally, our AI is responsible as it is built on leading ethics and data privacy standards.
How are customers and partners generating business results from ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ BTP generative AI capabilities?
Many of our partners are pioneering multiple generative AI use cases with our support.
·èÅÄ´«Ã½ partner and customer HCLTech is using AI technology to simplify daily tasks like recruiting in ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ SuccessFactors software for speed and efficiency in finding the best job candidates. They’re developing a catalog of generative AI-infused processes across industries and line-of-business use cases. India’s Mahindra & Mahindra, which has automated more than 250 business processes in just three months using ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Build Process Automation, has piloted two generative AI use cases.
In Brazil, social enterprise startup SDW brings clean water to over 20,000 people. The company used ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Build Apps to develop an app that speeds up field worker collaboration and analyzes accurate data to help measure the impact of its services against KPIs, proving ROI that boosts investments for growth. Henkel is co-innovating with ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ on its first large-scale generative AI use case, combining natural language processing, simulation, and planning to make decisions faster.
Can you preview what developers should expect from ·èÅÄ´«Ã½â€™s generative AI vision as we head into 2024?
We are building AI capabilities, including our new generative AI copilot Joule, into our cloud-based enterprise applications. This includes ·èÅÄ´«Ã½â€™s just ask feature in , available in Q1 2024. We’ll also continue expanding access to LLMs in the generative AI hub. Watch for more generative AI use cases that will be released in the first half of 2024.
