SAP at work on AI agents to up productivity

SAP, Europe’s largest technology company by market value, is the latest big name that is in the midst of developing artificial intelligence agents, or AI that is capable of performing complex actions.

“We are actively working on the technology,” SAP’s chief AI strategy officer Sean Kask told ET. “In public research and internal testing we see promising results from integrating AI agent workflows and multi-agent systems with SAP solutions and our copilot, Joule.”

Kask identified alerting of anomalies or appointments, decision support by for instance retrieving and comparing business documents to solve a problem, and task automation as areas where AI agents could have an impact in business.


“With productivity growth slowing and companies facing talent shortages, AI agents are one application of AI that have the potential to boost productivity beyond what even current software and AI technology can achieve,” Kask said.

The company has been focusing on business AI solutions. It recently announced it would release 100 generative AI use cases embedded in its products by the end of 2024. It is also building its own foundational AI model which could see a beta version released later this year, according to Kask.

Kask said that AI agents would bring significant benefit to business by helping with more diverse, complex processes that require planning and reflection, and accessing tools like SAP systems, calendars, and even working with other agents.

By comparison, existing large language model applications such as ChatGPT are mainly good at a single task such as proposing a response to an email, Kask noted.

For instance, if a user needs to plan a customer meeting, they could simply type, “Find when I need to be at the customer and plan my trip” into the agent, which could scan calendars and emails to identify the time of the meeting, check the CRM system for the customer address, and access a travel solution like SAP Concur to propose a travel itinerary - all while taking the company’s travel policy into account, Kask said.

“While many companies are experimenting with AI agents, SAP’s goal is to release AI capabilities to thousands of businesses at scale in their core processes,” he said.

He added, however, that capabilities will be released only when they comply with SAP’s enterprise product and reliability standards, and ethics policies.

Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce are among other big tech players who are working on AI agents.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has said that while it is still early days, the company is working on agent use cases such as returning an online order or helping a user explore a city or find services, where AI can think multiple steps ahead and act on their behalf.

Microsoft earlier this year introduced agent capabilities for its genAI assistant bot Copilot to run business processes and associated tasks.