SAP, a business application software company, is expecting that demand for artificial intelligence (AI) would boost cloud revenue.
In order to manage AI adoption across its services portfolio, the firm has created a new position of chief AI officer, as observed by Bloomberg News on Thursday, March 7, in an interview with Philipp Herzig, one of the company’s executives.
“An important part of our strategy is the goal to be really, really fast,” Herzig said.
Despite being a latecomer to the cloud, SAP has experienced significant growth in this area and plans to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to expedite this process for clients, according to the report.
Herzig disclosed to Bloomberg that over 24,000 SAP clients have embraced its AI solutions; of these, less than 1% are still utilizing on-premise systems. He continued by saying that creating “out-of-the-box” AI services for cloud consumers that need little to no retraining is simpler.
Some SAP on-premise customers have taken offense at this strategy, according to a report by Bloomberg News.
“Of course when it comes to AI and how these models are trained, these are things that have to take place in the cloud,” said Jens Hungershausen, chairman of DSAG, an interest group representing more than 3,800 SAP customers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. “But the results of these models can also, in our view, be used by on-premise systems.”
Instead of creating large language models (LLMs), the report claims that SAP’s strategy includes supporting AI startups like Anthropic and collaborating with major cloud providers like Google and Amazon.
“We selected those last year because they really had interesting technologies for the various parts of the AI architecture that we would need,” Herzig said. “Sometimes people see them only in terms of the large language model itself, but there’s so much more behind it.”
In order to integrate more AI into its operations, SAP stated in January that it was reorganizing. As a result, the business said 8,000 employees will either be retrained or would be placed on voluntary leave.
In other AI-related news, PYMNTS on Thursday spoke with Zohar Bronfman, CEO and co-founder of Pecan, to discuss how the technology is bridging the gap between accessible data and useful insights.
“Large language models in general are extremely good at interacting with humans, gathering data, and making knowledge and data accessible,” said Brofman, who spoke with PYMNTS during a conversation for the series the “AI Effect.”
“They are the best technology humanity has ever made that helps make knowledge accessible,” he added.