IBM and SAP join forces on milestone AI collaboration

image of Robot | IBM and SAP

Key Takeaways

IBM Watson's AI capabilities will be integrated into SAP solutions to enhance user experiences and drive innovation across the SAP portfolio.

The collaboration will enable SAP Start to utilize IBM Watson for improved productivity through natural language processing and predictive insights, streamlining common tasks and decision-making.

Both companies are also working together on generative AI and language models to enhance automation and continuous learning within SAP's critical applications, reinforcing their long-term partnership.

IBM has unveiled that IBM Watson will be embedded into SAP solutions to provide new AI-driven insights and automation to help accelerate innovation and create more efficient and effective user experiences across the SAP solution portfolio.

SAP will leverage IBM Watson to power its digital assistant in SAP Start, which provides a unified entry point for cloud solutions from SAP. With SAP Start, users can search for, launch and engage with apps provided in cloud solutions from SAP and S/4HANA Cloud. New AI capabilities in SAP Start will boost user productivity with natural language capabilities and predictive insights using IBM Watson AI solutions.

These new digital assistant capabilities in SAP Start will be extended across SAP solutions and will work to automate and speed up common tasks and unlock employee productivity to focus on more strategic work. Customers can benefit from intelligence at the point of decision-making with the ability to use AI and ML to extract information across various data sources.

In addition to embedding IBM Watson AI capabilities into SAP solutions, both companies are collaborating on generative AI and language models to deliver consistent continuous learning and automation based on SAP’s mission-critical application suite.

Arvind Krishna, chairman and CEO, IBM, said: “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.

“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.”

Christian Klein, CEO and member of the executive board of SAP SE, said: “This milestone collaboration with IBM aims to provide SAP customers a better user experience, faster decision-making and greater insights to help transform their business processes.

“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. This 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.”