The News: SAP announced several new features to the SAP Datasphere platform that are designed to help customers interact with their business data more intuitively and help drive more intelligent business transformations. SAP announced that its generative AI assistant tool, Joule, would be made available in SAP Analytics Cloud, where it can help to automate the creation of reports, dashboards, visualizations, and plans. The automation is being enabled through SAP’s new vector capabilities, which allow large language models (LLMs) to tap into unstructured data to provide more detailed insights and information.
The company also announced a new knowledge graph for uncovering insights and patterns within complex datasets, and extended its partnership with Collibra, under which SAP is integrating the Collibra AI Governance platform with SAP Datasphere to help ensure that compliance and privacy regulations are adhered to when using generative AI assistants such as Joule or other data-management tools. Finally, SAP Datasphere is being integrated more tightly with SAP Analytics Cloud to deliver more powerful analytics for cross-organizational planning. You can read more about these announcements on SAP’s website.
SAP Announces Generative AI Features with Datasphere Platform Upgrade
Analyst Take: SAP announced several enhancements to its Datasphere platform designed to make interacting with data easier, more efficient, and more secure, while driving real-time business insights through advanced technology such as AI. The SAP Datasphere platform was launched in March 2023 as the next generation of the previous SAP Data Warehouse Cloud. Datasphere is designed to serve as the main, centralized point for connecting, harmonizing, and distributing its customers’ data across SAP and non-SAP applications.
SAP Datasphere is designed to pull and unify information from various cloud providers, data vendors, and on-premises systems. The platform makes this information accessible in a single place, serving as a single source of truth, while retaining the business context of the information, instead of requiring manual processing to apply context. Once in Datasphere, the data can be integrated with SAP and third-party analytics tools, including generative AI assistants, to help companies analyze that information for business insights.
The company made the following announcements during its Data Unleashed web presentation:
- Joule, SAP’s generative-AI assistant, will be available to users in preview in SAP Analytics Cloud in Q2 2024: This copilot assistant is designed to automate the creation and development of reports, dashboards, plans and more, and is leveraging SAP’s HANA Cloud vector engine capabilities to ensure that generative AI outputs are delivered with business context provided by the organization’s data. SAP HANA Cloud vector engine is currently in public preview and is planned for general availability in late Q1 2024.
- Expansion of Collibra Partnership: SAP also announced it would integrate Collibra’s AI Governance with SAP data assets, which will provide organizations with a solution to govern the policies, processes, and practices of AI across not only SAP data, but data held within other applications and data sources. Collibra AI Governance is available to interested customers, and the integration between Collibra and SAP Datasphere is planned to be available first in Collibra in Q3 2024.
- Deployment of Knowledge Graph: SAP announced that SAP Datasphere knowledge graph technology is available in preview now. The technology is designed to let organizations discover hidden insights and patterns across their applications and systems. This enables both technical and business users to deeply understand the relationships between data, metadata, and business processes, as well as boost the effectiveness of machine learning and large language models to ensure they better understand and can faithfully represent real-world business data when searching for and providing responses to more sophisticated questions.
- Tighter Integration of SAP Datasphere with SAP Analytics Cloud: To deliver more powerful analytics for cross-organizational planning, SAP said companies can now leverage a single, flexible model to break down data silos, using a single tool for data preparation, modeling, and planning. In addition, SAP Analytics Cloud compass provides Monte Carlo simulation capabilities with a business-user-friendly interface, enabling non-technical users to perform real-time multi-variate analysis without prior IT setup or advanced statistical skills.
This integration also offers a new “compass” capability to SAP Analytics Cloud that is designed to enhance planning and analytics processes through data-driven simulations. Customers will be able to plan and run complex simulations using a simple chat-based, natural language interface, helping them predict business outcomes more accurately. A preview of SAP Analytics Cloud compass is planned to be available at the end of Q3 2024.
SAP Continues to Roll Out AI Initiatives and a Comprehensive Data Framework to Support Them
SAP has been advancing its AI initiatives on multiple fronts, rolling out its Joule generative AI-based copilot in late 2023 and subsequently extending its functionality across a range of use cases and applications. This approach is noteworthy, as organizations have seen the benefits of generative AI assistants with basic use cases (such as content summarization and generation) and are focused on deriving benefits across more complex use cases and data held both within a common platform and beyond.
SAP’s announcement of the extension of the Collibra partnership is key to this AI strategy, as Collibra will allow the customer to leverage common AI governance, practices, and controls across data held outside of SAP. This is particularly valuable for organizations that are leveraging generative AI tools across internal and external data and are worried about data security and leakage.
The value provided by SAP’s Datasphere incorporation of knowledge graphs is noteworthy, as it typically is a time-consuming and expensive process to incorporate content manually. SAP Datasphere knowledge graph is designed to overcome this challenge by pre-populating the knowledge graphs using all the valuable data already available in SAP Datasphere.
Furthermore, the tighter integration of SAP Datasphere with SAP Analytics Cloud will help organizations more easily plan across multiple units more efficiently via a single tool that can access a single source of truth. The incorporation of the compass capability further enhances this planning capability by allowing the design and execution of data-driven simulations that incorporate data from all relevant and required sources via an intuitive chat interface.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Other Insights from The Futurum Group:
SAP’s Generative AI Copilot, Joule, Coming to SAP Applications
SAP Meets or Exceeds All Key Financial Metrics for FY 2023
SAP’s New Generative AI Capabilities to Enhance Customer Experiences
Author Information
Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
