News
The Gist
- SAP's generative AI customer experience evolution. Unveiling advanced features in the CX suite.
- Diverse AI integration. SAP's holistic approach to commerce, sales and marketing.
- Joule: SAP's Business AI. Bridging business language and cloud enterprise insights.
SAP, the company traditionally known for its database-management, ERP, back-end enterprise software, continued its five-year foray into the world of customer experience software today.
The company rolled out its latest generative AI features in its SAP CX suite, designed to streamline customer service and marketing tasks and provide businesses with comprehensive insights, enabling them to offer more tailored customer interactions.
The newly introduced features cater to various sectors, including commerce, sales, customer service and marketing:
- Role-based AI tools: Over 10 tools have been introduced to enhance productivity by automating routine tasks. For instance, AI can summarize customer issues, suggest solutions and monitor resolution times.
- Enhanced catalog management: AI will assist commerce managers in ensuring product visibility and discoverability by reviewing product tags and catalogs, generating product descriptions and guiding customers to suitable choices.
- Intelligent Q&A: This feature aids in identifying and answering customer queries.
- Customer profile intelligence: SAP's AI-driven customer profiles provide a 360-degree view of customers, enabling more tailored interactions.
"AI is only as good as the data that powers it, which is why businesses need deep integration with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems to enable a seamless connection between operational data and customer experience," Sven Denecken, SVP & chief marketing and solutions officer, SAP Industries & CX, told CMSWire in an interview. "SAP has the unique ability to pull data and insights from the SAP ecosystem and third-party sources, so that AI can deliver more personalized experiences for customers and better decision-making and profitability for businesses."
Getting Into the Business of AI
SAP sees relevant, reliable and responsible "Business AI" as a critical component of its Intelligent CX solutions, according to Denecken. SAP’s latest addition to its suite of artificial intelligence solutions, Business AI, is Joule, is a natural language generative AI copilot providing AI-powered insights and assistance across SAP’s cloud enterprise portfolio. Embedded into SAP applications, Joule delivers insights from SAP’s solution portfolio and integrated partner solutions, correlating business language with business data.
"What sets Joule apart is its understanding of business language, grounding in SAP data, and enabling customers to easily use natural language for work," Denecken said.
Strengthening Customer Data Security With AI
SAP is enhancing its Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) solutions by introducing AI-driven risk-based authentication capabilities. These innovations bolster the security of end-user identity data and preempt threats by gathering intelligence across all digital touchpoints. This ensures that customer data remains private and secure, a cornerstone in maintaining customer trust, according to SAP officials.
With AI integrations come privacy and security concerns, naturally. You don't have to go far to find news on major breaches from the most well-known generative AI innovators. Given the sensitive nature of customer data, how does SAP ensure the security and privacy of data utilized by these AI capabilities? Are there any new security features or certifications?
Denecken reiterated SAP's unwavering commitment to safeguarding customer data. "Protecting that data is our top priority," he said, emphasizing the company's dedication to ensuring that their Business AI is relevant, reliable and responsible. SAP's AI ethics policy and AI Ethics Practices further bolster this commitment, he added. Denecken also highlighted the company's proprietary AI capabilities, which prioritize secure data retrieval, personal identifiable information obfuscation and bias prevention.
"In the case of emerging generative AI, including Joule, we ensure that no customer data is sent to third-party vendors to train foundation models nor is it vulnerable to later extraction by malicious actors," he added.
Related Article: Qualtrics Partners With SAP to Aid Contact Center Customer Experience
SAP Integrations Within CX Suite
Here are some other product updates SAP announced today:
Enhancing Productivity With AI-Driven Tools
SAP has rolled out AI capabilities that feature over 10 CX role-based tools. These are crafted to boost productivity by taking over routine tasks, allowing CX professionals to delve deeper into the more intricate aspects of their roles. For instance, when a customer issue pops up, AI is equipped to distill the situation, gauge customer sentiment, offer solutions and monitor the resolution's pace.
Catalog Management Through AI
The challenge of maintaining catalog health is a significant burden for commerce managers, according to SAP officials. When products are not tagged correctly, they risk becoming invisible in search results, and subpar product recommendations can hamper conversions. SAP's new AI tools ensure products are both visible and discoverable. They can meticulously review product tags and catalogs, craft and modify product descriptions and steer customers toward the most-fitting product choices. By leveraging Intelligent Catalog Enrichment, businesses can enhance product visibility, improve conversion rates and ensure customer satisfaction, according to SAP officials.
Empowering Conversations With Proactive AI Responses
SAP's AI can proactively identify and respond to customer queries within conversations. For instance, if a salesperson receives a product-related email from a customer, the new "Intelligent Q&A" feature can interpret the email, highlight questions and suggest a response infused with the latest product details.
Delivering Personalized Customer Insights
SAP, through its subsidiary Emarsys, emphasizes the importance of businesses having a holistic view of their customers. Leveraging AI-generated customer profiles from the real-time SAP Customer Data Platform, businesses can amalgamate data from various applications, presenting a comprehensive customer profile.
Generative AI, as part of the SAP Emarsys Customer Engagement platform, offers marketers the tools to produce targeted email content that resonates with the intended audience. Additionally, the SAP Sales Cloud and SAP Service Cloud will incorporate new generative AI features, such as AI-generated summaries and email response generation, to help users pinpoint relevant information and enhance customer interactions.
Turbulent Start to 2023 for SAP
It hasn't been the smoothest 2023 for the Germany-based software and services giant. SAP CEO Christian Klein announced in January his intent to carry out “a targeted restructuring in select areas of the company” impacting up to 3,000 positions — or about 2.5% of its global workforce. He shared the news during the company’s full-year and fourth-quarter 2022 earnings call, where he also announced the company would explore a sale of its stake in Qualtrics, the customer and employee experience management software firm.
SAP in March hired 1,000 positions. In its third-quarter financial reporting this month, SAP said cloud revenue up 16%.
While SAP is doubling down today on CX and AI integrations, it did in fact sell in March all of its 423 million shares of Qualtrics, a major CX software provider SAP acquired in 2018 for $8 billion when it was touting its foray into customer experience. The sale in March of Qualtrics went to Silver Lake and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments).
Related Article: SAP Sells Qualtrics Shares in $12.5B Acquisition by Silver Lake and CPP Investments
The Future of CX at SAP
Looking ahead, Denecken revealed SAP's Intelligent CX strategy, which focuses on providing industry-specific, AI-infused CX solutions. This strategy is anchored in four pillars: industry-tailored, connected, insightful, and adaptive. SAP aims to unlock greater value for customers by offering differentiated, industry-tailored, AI-infused solutions.
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Denecken emphasized that the recent AI enhancements are a testament to SAP's commitment to this strategy. "We are delivering on our promise," he said, "to ensure Intelligent CX solutions are AI-powered and targeted at complex, enterprise use-cases."
