SAP announces numerous new generative AI capabilities, enhancing Datasphere platform

SAP is launching a number of new generative AI capabilities and these capabilities will soon be available in the SAP Datasphere platform.

#SAP stated that the latest updated features will provide users with a more intuitive business data interaction experience and help promote more intelligent transformation of enterprises. These new capabilities include copilot tools to automate a variety of data analysis tasks, and vector database capabilities to support more advanced generative AI workloads. In addition, new knowledge graphs are launched to reveal various insights and patterns in complex data sets. The introduction of these functions will bring users more efficient workflows, enhance data analysis capabilities, and provide more comprehensive support for corporate decision-making.

SAP Datasphere is released in March 2023, just two days away from its launch date. SAP explained that SAP Datasphere is the next generation of the SAP Data Warehouse Cloud and is designed to serve as a primary centralized point to connect, coordinate and distribute customer data from SAP and non-SAP applications.

The platform extracts information from various cloud providers, data vendors and on-premises systems and makes all this data accessible in one place, integrating with third-party analytics tools to help enterprises analyze this information to Gain business insights. The advantage of SAP Datasphere is that it automatically retains the business context of the information collected, unlike other centralized data warehouses that must use manual processes to capture this context.

With this update, SAP Datasphere can now provide users with more advantages. For example, SAP Analytics Cloud provides SAP's generative AI - copilot Joule, which can be used to automatically create reports, dashboards, visualizations, plans, etc.

SAP noted that this automation is achieved with the latest vector capabilities of SAP HANA Cloud, which is now widely available to users. Vector search is an important feature of generative AI, enabling large language models to fully exploit unstructured data, further enhancing the scope of their knowledge.

SAP said that in order to protect customer data from being leaked by Joule or other generative AI models, they are strengthening their cooperation with Collibra. Ensure compliance with compliance and privacy regulations by integrating the Collibra AI Governance platform with SAP Datasphere. This collaboration will further strengthen data management and protection measures to ensure the security and compliance of customer data.

The new SAP Datasphere Knowledge Graph will provide users with the support to discover hidden insights and patterns in the business. This capability enables technology and business leaders to more deeply explore the relationships between data, metadata and business processes. This technology can also improve the performance of generative AI and provide users with a better experience.

Finally, SAP Datasphere is more tightly integrated with SAP Analytics to provide more powerful analytics for cross-organizational planning. SAP said enterprises can now leverage a single, flexible model to break down data silos and use a single tool for data preparation, modeling and planning.

This integration also brings new "Compass" capabilities to SAP Analytics Cloud to enhance planning and analysis processes with data-driven simulations. Users can use a simple chat interface to design and run complex simulations to help They predict business results more accurately.

SAP Chief Technology Officer Juergen Mueller said that capturing data to make better decisions has become a top priority for enterprises. He said that modern AI applications rely on high-quality data, and SAP Datasphere is a perfect platform to obtain this data. He added: “Our latest SAP Datasphere innovations, and our expanded new partnership with Collibra, represent a giant leap forward in our ability to help customers drive intelligent business transformation through data.”

Constellation Research analyst Doug Henschen said he believes SAP is on the right path with Datasphere, particularly its emphasis on an open data ecosystem and a semantic layer that sits above all information sources. He said: "SAP is now leveraging contextual understanding of its applications and customers' business goals to support vector search, knowledge graphs and generative AI. SAP customers tell me that Datasphere's structured architecture gives them the flexibility to access what they need in the cloud. Everything without having to move or copy data at high cost."

SAP has been advancing their AI plans in multiple areas. Just weeks after launching Joule, SAP has launched a variety of Joule-powered tools for customer service teams. Then in November last year, SAP launched SAP Build Code, a version of SAP's low-code development platform SAP Build, which includes AI-driven productivity aids optimized for Java and JavaScript development.

In July last year, SAP participated in Aleph Alpha’s $500 million Series B financing, a German startup company focused on developing large-scale language models. In the same month, SAP invested in Anthropic and Cohere, a large language model developer, for an undisclosed amount.