In the agentic AI era, SAP wants to differentiate itself by simplifying integrations with ERP data and giving front-office workers access to it.
Rolling out starting today -- with more planned throughout the rest of the year -- are SAP customer experience (CX) AI agents and assistants that aim to enable customer service workers to perform more detailed case management. The AI tools will also enable marketers to activate campaigns based on operational data, e-commerce teams to understand inventory flows, and sales teams to analyze more deals and identify the elements needed to complete them.
Also coming soon: Agents that turn on "buy-for-me" capabilities for a user's customers.
SAP earlier this month said it plans to acquire two startups, Dremio -- a data lakehouse -- and Prior Labs, a frontier AI model foundry, both of which will figure into future SAP functionality if the deals go through. Another acquisition from last March, Reltio, adds new master data management capabilities to SAP's platform.
AI agents vs. assistants
Agents do work, while assistants help frontline employees in various CX roles -- customer service and marketing, for example -- shape their ideas and manage their agents as they solve customer issues or determine market segments for their next campaign, said Balaji Balasubramanian, president and chief product officer of SAP Customer Experience and Consumer Industries.
"The difference between the two is that agents are the real, autonomic thing that actually wakes up, runs, understands [work] and produces results," Balasubramanian said. "Assistants, the way we think about it, are targeted to a persona, to a department, to a team."
SAP, Balasubramanian said, is moving from a "human in the loop" metaphor -- where AI needs approvals to advance work on a task -- to "human on the loop," where people monitor the AI as it works autonomously. But humans are the key to keeping those workflows working properly.
"Humans matter, and they will get involved, like a customer service, a marketing or a sales persona, and then there are places where it's better digitally…" he said. "The human on the loop becomes so much more powerful to drive profitable growth."
Where users are
Enterprise customers of SAP -- and everybody else -- are still in the process of reimagining their processes and how they will work, moving forward, as they also tackle their data projects to make AI the connective tissue of their operations, said PwC Digital Core Modernization Platform Leader Jennifer Colapietro and her colleague Munish Gupta, Principal, SAP Customer Experience Lead.
"We are seeing a crawl, walk, run situation," Gupta said. Customers are still determining whether to go human-in-the-loop or on-the-loop, and how to orchestrate the processes they are redesigning for AI. "This whole area is moving so fast, and every day there is something new."
That said, SAP is well-positioned to enable customers to deploy agents and assistants interspersed among humans in their workstreams.
"SAP has a real opportunity in front of them," Colapietro said. "We're already seeing SAP evolve itself from primarily a back-office ERP platform to a connected enterprise platform that can link operations and data -- the back office -- [with] the middle office and the front office.
The new SAP CX features debuted today at the company's Sapphire user conference in Orlando, Fla.
Don Fluckinger is a seasoned B2B technology journalist with over 30 years of experience, specializing in enterprise IT, digital experience and content management. As a senior news writer at Informa TechTarget, he delivers award-winning analysis that helps IT and business leaders navigate complex technologies to enhance customer and employee experiences. Got a tip? Email him.
