SAP Start is the SAP-managed homepage for SAP cloud solutions that allows users a single URL to access across solutions, including UI integration cards, business tasks, and standard business content, among many others.
SAP and IBM’s five-decade-long alliance continue to deepen as the German enterprise software company announced their latest collaborative partnership around artificial intelligence (AI). Centered on reinforcing the capabilities of SAP Start, a unified entry point to access various applications and contents, SAP will be leveraging the power of IBM Watson’s enterprise-grade AI to drive efficiency and automation when navigating SAP cloud solutions.
Christian Klein, CEO and Member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, explained that the milestone collaboration between the two tech behemoths intends to deliver SAP customers enhanced user experience and foster informed, quicker decision-making to accelerate their business transformation journey. He added:
“Working together to incorporate additional AI, machine learning and other intelligent technologies into SAP solutions can lead to better business outcomes for our joint customers. Today’s news, along with the recent news of our expanded use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, is a prime example of how the rich, 50-year partnership between our companies continues to grow stronger and move the industry forward.”
SAP Start Powered by IBM AI
Through the years, SAP and IBM’s longstanding alliance have been continuously developing alongside the companies’ cloud momentum, supporting the progress of each other’s cloud solutions. In 2021, SAP onboarded two of its finance and data management solutions to IBM Cloud for Financial Services to help accelerate the banking and finance industry’s IBM cloud adoption. Last year, IBM launched BREAKTHROUGH with IBM for RISE with SAP, which brings together IBM services and SAP solutions designed to assist customers in amplifying their journeys to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, leveraging RISE with SAP as its core.
Today, SAP has tapped IBM Watson to enhance the digital assistant capabilities of SAP Start, which enables users to navigate and engage with cloud applications from SAP and SAP S/4HANA Cloud. Embedding the IBM Watson AI solutions, SAP Start is expected to offer new AI capabilities– including natural language capabilities and predictive insights– to improve productivity. IBM Watson AI is known as a trustworthy AI that enables data privacy, compliance, and security, even across highly regulated industries while supporting an open, diverse ecosystem.
“IBM and SAP are joining forces to give businesses new and exciting ways to harness the transformative power of AI and use it as a source of competitive advantage,” said Arvind Krishna, IBM Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. “With this announcement, we are infusing IBM Watson’s powerful, enterprise-grade AI capabilities into SAP’s leading ERP platform to help businesses reimagine customer experiences, boost productivity, and fuel growth.”
The latest AI collaboration sees SAP Start’s digital assistant capabilities extend across SAP solutions to help managers and employees with queries as well as drive efficiency through the automation of standard tasks. In addition, AI and machine learning capabilities offer customers significant insights from various data sources across business lines.
Further down the line, SAP and IBM aim to boost consistent, uninterrupted learning and automation around SAP’s mission-critical application suite leveraging generative AI and large language models. Currently, SAP and IBM Consulting support customers with 25 joint intelligent industry solutions that harness IBM Watson capabilities built around the SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP).
