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Is AI a useful addition to your ERP with SAP CoPilot?

SOA People |

As Google launches Google Duplex, it’s time for enterprises to think about SAP CoPilot as their corporate digital assistant.

The recent Google IO conference saw the launch of Google Duplex, the artificially intelligent assistant that can call people up and interact with them – without people ever knowing they are speaking to a robot.

AI (artificial intelligence) is now part of our every lives but it’s been a long time coming. During the war years Alan Turing was already thinking about the relationship between human and computer intelligence, pioneering the idea of AI. Google’s new digital assistant Duplex is a big milestone in AI development, and SAP CoPilot also.

Watch the video: https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-duplex-beat-the-turing-test-are-we-doomed/

But how can AI interact with your ERP?

An optional component of SAP Fiori 2.0, SAP CoPilot is the SAP digital assistant that’s now available in S/4HANA Cloud and SAP is soon to make it available on premise. SAP CoPilot uses natural language processing (NLP) to enable users to communicate with software in an intuitive way, using language that people use to talk to each other instead of special computer language.

Such a digital assistant for your ERP really will simplify the user experience as it can deliver the information you need so you won’t have to scan through reams of data or step-by-step processes to find what you’re looking for, or navigate from screen to screen, however easy clicking is.

Example – Using AI to book a vacation

Take an easy example. With SAP CoPilot, booking a day’s vacation in with HR couldn’t be easier. The question and answer conversational interaction of how many days’ vacation left have I got, can you book me a day’s vacation or when are my colleagues away becomes a quick call as SAP CoPilot understands the business context and has access to your enterprise system, doing all the work for you.

SAP CoPilot will become smarter over time as machine learning develops, allowing us to identify a wide range of business situations where a digital assistant would save time and effort. It could help you manage contracts by notifying you about expiries, making recommendations or clarifying situations. Integral to your SAP master data, so if you are a purchaser and need to create an order, it will know you need to raise a purchase order, if you are in a commercial sales position and need a sales order, SAP CoPilot will know what your role is and what you need.

It will be able to reach deep into your business tasks, whether complex or business-critical. These interactions will incrementally make SAP CoPilot more component, ultimately helping you do your job better and faster than ever before.

Digging deeper into SAP CoPilot

Technically SAP CoPilot is running on SAP Cloud Platform and integrated into Fiori Launchpad. So even if you are an on premise S/4HANA user you can use these cloud services via the cloud platform.

The digital assistant effectively allows business users to talk to the SAP user interface. You already have graphical UI with Fiori 2.0 and SAP CoPilot is an optional component allowing you to interact with conversational UI.

SAP CoPilot is available in English only at the moment but will be rolled out to other languages soon.

Take home

As an SAP customer you should have SAP CoPilot on your radar. It already works well with S/4HANA and as machine learning becomes more sophisticated so will AI for ERP. It will increase your productivity, simplify your user interface, like SAP Fiori is already doing, and give you a richer, more natural ‘just talking’ experience than just using a touch screen or keyboard.

Keep up to date with SAP CoPilot. Contact us for more information

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