AI Overlords, or Assistants? SAP Bots are Here to Help

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning have a great deal of potential to change the way people work. Understandably, there is great concern about the robots stealing our jobs. However, one of the first real applications of AI is to help humans work better. We see glimpses of intelligent robots helping us all the time on commercial websites like Netflix and Amazon in the form of “if you liked this, you might like that.”

These recommendation engines are driven by machine learning and are very accurate (at least for me). Although the recommendations can be unsettlingly on point, they are a big improvement in the user experience by reminding us of things we are interested in that we may have forgotten about and keep us engaged on those sites.

An AI Conversation

It is not a big stretch to see how machine learning can be leveraged in enterprise user experiences as well. In fact, SAP Leonardo features conversational AI as a way of interacting with enterprise software through the natural language capabilities of SAP Leonardo Machine Learning Foundation. Based on this foundation, you can build your own digital assistant or bot that can assist with the completion of tasks. For example, a conversational interface that helps create a new maintenance notification where the system helps a person define and resolve the problem as illustrated below.

Interacting with natural language in the form of voice or simple text commands is much easier for casual users and allows for a dramatic improvement in user satisfaction by providing individual and contextual communcication. To that end, SAP introduced CoPilot in the 1705 release of SAP S/4HANA Cloud and continues to invest in bot technology. In fact, SAP has recently purchased a French company called Recast.AI to further drive the development of conversational chatbots. Considering the benefits of AI-driven software in the workplace, instead of fearing our new robot overlords, maybe we can welcome a new and more human-centric way to interact with enterprise systems.