SAP teams up with NVIDIA to bolster SAP Business AI

⇨ SAP will integrate NVIDIA’s generative AI tech into SAP Datasphere, SAP BTP and RISE with SAP

⇨ Partnership will bring enhancements to Joule, data science software and developer services

⇨ Set to be available at the end of 2024

SAP will integrate NVIDIA’s generative AI foundry service into SAP Datasphere, SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) and RISE with SAP.

Announced at NVIDIA’s GTC developer conference in San Jose, USA, SAP will use NVIDIA DGX Cloud AI supercomputing, NVIDIA AI Enterprise software and NVIDIA AI foundation models to add more capabilities to the generative AI hub in SAP AI Core and SAP Datasphere.

The new integrated capabilities are set to be available at the end of 2024.

“Enterprise customers want to leverage state-of-the-art technology that delivers real business value,” SAP CEO Christian Klein said.

“Strategic technology partnerships, like the one between SAP and NVIDIA, are at the core of our strategy to invest in technology that maximizes the potential and opportunity of AI for business. NVIDIA’s expertise in delivering AI capabilities at scale will help SAP accelerate the pace of transformation and better serve our customers in the cloud.”

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said that SAP is “sitting on a gold mine” of enterprise data that can be transformed into generative AI agents to help customers automate their business.

“Together, NVIDIA and SAP will bring custom generative AI to the thousands of enterprises around the world that rely on SAP to power their operations,” he said.

The integration will bring new capabilities to the Joule copilot through retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Built by both SAP and NVIDIA, RAG fills some of Joule’s gaps through retrieving facts external sources from to make Joule more accurate and reliable.

SAP is also exploring some 20-plus new use cases including ERP automation in S/4HANA, improving HR use cases through SuccessFactors and gaining new generative AI insights from Signavio.

SAP Datasphere will also be enhanced through NVIDIA’s AI Enterprise data science software RAPIDS and other accelerated computing platforms. These are aimed to help SAP facilitate easier access to data for data scientists and bolster machine-learning workload performance.

SAP will also use NVIDIA AI foundry services to assist in fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) to aid developers in creating domain-specific language code. This adds to SAP’s existing generative AI work to help developers using the ABAP programming language via SAP’s ABAP Cloud model and SAP Cloud Application Programming model.

Also involved are the newly announced NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, NVIDIA NIM inference microservices and NVIDIA NeMo Retriever microservices. NIM inference will help customers accelerate and maximise inference performance across their SAP infrastructure, while NeMo Retriever will enable generative AI applications to more securely access data running on SAP software to improve accuracy and insights.