Artificial intelligence is an emerging technology that a lot of companies have adopted to make their lives easier. Borne out of a necessity to train automated systems, artificial intelligence, and its close relative machine learning have come as godsends to industries around the globe. A few companies have noticed the potential that AI offers, and seek to integrate it alongside their existing business processes to improve efficiency.
One of the early adopters of the technology was SAP. Advances in AI technology has seen SAP embrace integration with some of its core offerings. Sadly, AI isn’t cheap, and it takes a lot of convincing for some companies to jump on board a new, relatively untested technology. In this article, we intend to address the successes that SAP integration with AI has brought to different industries, hoping that business decision-makers will see the positives in taking a chance on AI.
Automated Chatbots and Conversational AI
It’s no surprise that the most visible location for AI implementation in business is in Chatbots. AI cannot only “remember” millions of conversations but leverage its perfect recall to link conversations with experiences. SAP’s Conversational AI integrates seamlessly with business processes and can serve as a utility business assistant to deal with customer concerns.
The Conversational AI system capitalizes on advanced artificial intelligence algorithms to provide contextually aware responses to customer queries. Since it’s automated and learns from customers’ inputs, it can continuously adapt and improve as time goes along. Additionally, with each new response, the system’s awareness of a particular customer gets better, allowing it to make more informed decisions. The icing on the cake is that it’s available for users’ queries, no matter the time of the day or night. It’s convenient for businesses that operate globally, such as YEAH! Local, without needing to worry about opening and closing hours for customer support.
Process Automation
One of the areas that AI excels in is deciphering complex schematics and adapting or copying them. This ability makes them ideal for the manufacture of printed circuit board (PCB) schematics for engineering firms, contractors, and manufacturers. PCBs form the basis of these businesses’ electronic components, and automation can significantly increase their production rate. By teaching the AI how to reverse engineer PCBs automatically, engineers free themselves up for more complex tasks.
In other industries, such as finance, process automation is also finding a lot of success. A lot of financial processes can be automated, but AI allows algorithms to adapt to changes and respond to errors in real-time. Additionally, with the right ruleset, an AI can potentially predict the direction of a business’s finances and suggest methods to improve the company’s results. The majority of the time that financial workers dedicate to rote tasks can also be significantly reduced, freeing them up to dedicate their efforts to analysis rather than data entry and processing.
Data is Critical
Complex business processes can generate a lot of data – if it can be untangled. By leveraging SAP data intelligence’s enterprise-grade AI engine, companies can analyze that data and come up with solutions. This development underscores the close relationship between data and AI automation, especially within a business environment. As automation improves and more data is collected the efficiency of the processes will also rise.
By itself, SAP ERP already represents a very sophisticated and useful suite of tools that can help improve business processes. Combining these utilities with the potential that AI can provide through machine learning can lead to exciting results. As the march of technology continues, businesses that adopt AI to use with their SAP deployment will experience firsthand the benefit it can offer their companies as both the business and the AI that manages scale together.
Original Article:
https://blogs.sap.com/2020/06/14/optimizing-operations-using-ai-and-sap/