A catalyst for change: Gen AI in RISE with SAP transformations

Both artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (Gen AI) play a critical role in RISE with SAP transformations. The latter though, Gen AI, offers specific capabilities for both enriching the deployment of RISE with SAP, and maximizing its potential.

Let’s take a brief look at what these capabilities are.

From a big-picture perspective, Gen AI and RISE with SAP share many common goals. Both, after all, are dedicated to driving business transformation. They also increasingly share the same “space” with Gen AI assistants such as Joule, which is now integrated into SAP’s RISE bundling.

But as with any technology that for many sits somewhere between potential and practical value, Gen AI – particularly in the context of RISE with SAP – still raises many “how” questions:

• How can it reduce the risk and help optimize the actual deployment of RISE with SAP?
• How can it enable clear business value, in areas such as procurement and accounts payable?

The first step to answering these questions is understanding what’s realistically possible. Yet it’s also important to understand what’s suitable, given the fact that a mix of standard AI and automation will most likely be the answer for 80 percent of current Gen AI use cases.

Gen AI for delivering RISE with SAP transformations

The true value of Gen AI, in the context of a large, multi-year change program, is its ability to accelerate delivery, reduce the risk profile, and improve efficiency. For example:

• It can be used as an assistant during implementation workshops, helping answer questions, and creating in-depth reports.
• Based on these discussions, Gen AI can then create functional specifications, technical designs of custom objects, and configuration documents to significantly ease the manual burden.
• There’s also an important data migration benefit with Gen AI automatically mapping and transforming data from legacy systems to SAP S/4HANA.
• Last but not least, Gen AI can be used to generate code, thereby accelerating the software development lifecycle and ensuring quality assurance.

According to the latest Capgemini Research Institute report, Generative AI in organizations 2024, organizations have seen a fourfold increase in the deployment of generative AI, with 20 percent boosting investments and realizing tangible benefits like enhanced customer engagement and operational efficiency. These benefits are also key drivers behind using Gen AI for RISE with SAP implementations.

Overall, the correct application of Gen AI can have a huge impact and cut the costs of a RISE with SAP implementation by up to 15–20 percent.

Gen AI for delivering business value as part of the implementation

Outside of the delivery conversation, which certainly helps accelerate the benefits of the transformation, what really makes Gen AI a long-term enabler of the value of a transformation based on RISE with SAP are the business use cases. These create the transformational outcomes that provide the all-important business case justification.

That is why the activation of embedded AI/Gen AI use cases, as well as the identification of additional ones, should always be part of the solution design.

SAP is heavily investing in integrating Gen AI features into core business processes to automate, optimize, and bring contextual navigation to any task. These capabilities sit at the heart of the Joule offering, which is available via the RISE and GROW with SAP offerings.  These are usually industry-specific and cover a wide range of areas such as:

• Supply chain resilience
• Recruitment matching
• Predictive analytics.

The value underpinning these activities will manifest in the form of more automated and independent processes, enhanced productivity, and more informed decision-making. Yet equally, it’s about streamlining the way users interact with systems – and making the process easier and more intuitive for creating highly specific outcomes.

Obstacles to change

Gen AI may represent a major change in enterprise technology, but its introduction alone does not guarantee success. This is where change management enters the picture, because in reality Gen AI demands changes to standard operating procedures:

• For people, that means overcoming long-established habits (“I’ve always done it this way…”) and skills resistance (“I’m an expert developer, and don’t need Gen AI…”).
• For processes, Gen AI inevitably requires a degree of fine-tuning to maximize the outcomes it delivers.

There can also be an understandable wariness of the technology itself, with concerns extending from ethical considerations to practical day-to-day issues relating to data security and the introduction of bias into any system.

Embracing what’s possible

Despite these potential obstacles, it’s an undisputed fact that Gen AI drives better business outcomes. Depending upon the use case, there is also significant value in using the technology now, as an ever-growing number of organizations can confirm. The difference made by RISE with SAP is that it makes adoption far easier and more compelling.

RISE with SAP might not represent the totality of an organization’s AI strategy, but it does enable the key capabilities such as SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) that are critical to ongoing innovation.  Embedding Gen AI into RISE with SAP is also central to SAP’s long-term AI roadmap, making it important for customers to embrace the opportunity. This is where Capgemini can help, working with our SAP clients to help them:

• Identify the right use cases for Gen AI, while also deploying standard AI, automation, and hyper-automation
• Access the tools and accelerators needed to speed up the delivery of projects
• Utilize our deep relationship with SAP to surround their Gen AI journey with added reassurance
• Identify new use cases that enrich the ones out of the box from SAP
• Provide tools and frameworks for a safe, trusted, and cost-effective use of Gen AI.

Final thoughts

Improving forecast accuracy, lowering inventory costs, and detecting fraud – these and more use cases represent the ultimate goal of Gen AI projects. With Gen AI, a user can chat with a system, ask it to create a report, a purchase order, or a line of code, and receive increasingly personalized responses. This is the new reality as enabled by RISE with SAP and supported by all the experience and insight available from Capgemini.

It all points to an exciting future.

Read our next blog part of the series.