SAP® Customers Positioned for Significant Benefits through the Combination of Automation and AI with Extraordinary ROI.

If you think of AI as the “brain,” you need a “body” to make things happen. This is where automation comes in. Connecting AI and automation allows you to experience the potential of AI and quickly capture all the benefits it offers.

In my latest blog post, we discussed how AI-driven automation can radically reduce SAP S/4HANA migration project timelines. But where else can automation and AI have a transformational impact within an SAP environment?

The Short Answer: Everywhere. In finance and accounting. In human capital management. In customer experience. Throughout your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.

Let’s explore specific use cases in a moment. First, it’s important to understand how to make AI quickly accessible to the business.

How Do Companies Quickly Access and Utilize AI?

Making AI accessible in a way that adds value to business users means embedding AI into the workflows that drive the underlying business processes. However, it is in the initial adoption and implementation of AI where many organizations struggle.

Let’s talk about how to make this a reality.

There are two ways to incorporate AI into a business process, and automation is the essential ingredient in both.

The most common approach is to enhance an existing process by adding new AI-based capabilities to improve performance, accuracy, or another key metric. A great example here (and one of the most mature use cases in the business realm today) is Intelligent Document Processing (IDP).

Built on an automation infrastructure, IDP can process documents at scale: understanding content, extracting the required text, and connecting it all to SAP’s core business system. Integrating human review ensures potential accuracy risks are captured from the start.

In the second scenario, AI unlocks entirely new business processes that were previously unviable. Imagine you want to review all customer emails, support tickets, voicemail messages, and chats from the last five years to understand and summarize key customer issues and concerns. This process didn’t exist before because the volume of requests would require human review at an unviable and overly costly scale. It simply wasn’t practical.

However, now, using communication mining technology that leverages natural language processing (NLP), it’s easy to build an automated process that understands and classifies customer feedback. This workflow can also recommend and generate automatic responses to new requests using the most accurate and helpful information available.

Generating More Value from AI by Adding an Automation Layer

What ties both scenarios together is the need for an automation layer; without it, the “brain” of AI cannot act.

More specifically, organizations will need robust, unified automation that only an end-to-end automation platform can provide.

Why a Platform?

Business processes cannot rely on simplistic agents or manually managed scripts. If they break or operate slowly, it can have a material impact on the performance and stability of critical business operations. Reliability and transparency are essential.

An enterprise-grade automation platform provides security, visibility, and governance, minimizing operational risk. While it is relatively easy to program your own automations to run simple workflows and even operationalize AI in production, it also creates technical debt for the IT organization. Scripts written by experts must be maintained, which generates a new burden with every contribution. Before long, you’ll see these (very well-paid) experts spending more time maintaining their scripts than doing the high-value work for which they are best suited. It simply does not scale and leads to a productivity ceiling that worsens as demand for more AI projects increases. In contrast, there is no ceiling when adopting a platform approach to automation.

With an end-to-end automation platform, adding AI to a business process becomes a user-defined drag-and-drop experience delivered by an automation expert. This separation of responsibilities is a critical success factor that synchronizes the combined skills of business and IT experts without overloading any role.

Transformational Impact for SAP Customers

If you read my latest blog post, you already know that AI-driven automation can radically reduce SAP S/4HANA migration project timelines. But let’s dive deeper into where automation and AI can have a transformational impact within an SAP environment.

Take an invoice, for example. Once it’s in SAP’s ERP system, processing is fast and straightforward. The first challenge of inefficiency, however, is entering data, which is often a manual task. Emails must be opened and read; attached (or embedded) invoices must be verified against goods receipts. Then, data must be entered into the ERP system. And there are many more manual steps to be done.

A better way is to use AI to read and understand the document, regardless of language or format, and leverage automation to integrate that data into the invoicing workflow. Suddenly, the need to perform manual tasks virtually disappears. A finance professional now only needs to validate ambiguous data or handle exceptions, and they will receive alerts when their expertise is needed. Once provided, the automation layer “kicks in” and executes the next necessary actions.

The time savings and elimination of human errors when handling documents (or processes) throughout your SAP environment yield benefits that quickly accumulate. Human capacity is enhanced, costs are systematically eliminated from business operations, and new revenue opportunities driven by AI emerge more frequently. Your business operations enter a state of persistent innovation, all because you’ve seamlessly intertwined AI with automation.

The key to unlocking the true value of AI lies in making it real, every day, across the enterprise. An automation platform is the best and fastest way to achieve this.

I’ve been to numerous events where organizations have shared their experiences. They describe how vital it is to ensure that every AI and automation project aligns with the strategic goals of the business. Spend time with these companies, and you will quickly realize that there are hundreds of use cases for SAP users, many of which are generating incredible results.

Real Impacts and Outcomes for SAP Customers

How Intel Uses AI to Help Classify Its Products Winner of the UiPath AI10 Award 2023 AI-driven automation has had an impact on Intel’s Global Trade Group, the team responsible for managing millions of global shipments. Intel sought to increase operational efficiency and reduce costs in its SAP-backed trade compliance selection process.

After successfully implementing AI and automation, the selection process now automatically classifies 80% of products and eliminates delays caused by human errors. The effort required to complete these mundane tasks has been reduced by 85%, freeing up significant human capacity for more challenging projects.

Applied Materials is another great example. Using a combination of AI and the UiPath™ enterprise automation platform, this leading semiconductor equipment supplier has transformed end-to-end processes across its global application ecosystem, including SAP.

Applied Materials has automated over 250 processes to date. They have implemented over 140 AI use cases and saved an impressive 350,000 work hours. But these metrics do not tell the whole story. By reducing the time and money spent on repetitive tasks, Applied Materials was able to reinvest its savings into research and development, keeping costs stable and increasing profitability.

A People-Centric Approach to Success

I am very excited about the opportunity for SAP users to leverage the power of enterprise automation to capture the full potential of AI and achieve new levels of efficiency in their business processes. It’s a total game changer.

At the same time, it’s important for SAP users to think strategically and aim for complete end-to-end processes so they can reap all the benefits, but in a slightly different way than you might imagine.

What really matters is a people-centric approach that aligns with the real experience of each customer’s business processes, including the many manual tasks needed at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end—all to make things run efficiently. So when UiPath talks about end-to-end automation, we really mean it.

By targeting every stage of a process, organizations can reach their maximum productivity potential. It’s liberating when you no longer need to ask people to perform mundane tasks just to fill the gaps in a business process created by outdated tools.