Artificial intelligence takes tasks away from SAP experts - a good thing

Around 84 percent of companies worldwide rate artificial intelligence (AI) as essential to their competitiveness, and one in two attributes significant transformational power to the technology.

That is the result of a global survey by Tata Consultancy Services. According to the executives surveyed, AI is impacting nearly all areas of the company.

Unsurprisingly, it is mainly IT departments that use artificial intelligence today: more than two-thirds (68 percent) of the companies surveyed use it to detect security gaps, solve user problems or automate routine processes.

Meanwhile, AI can also solve common business process errors, prevent compliance violations, and reduce complexity in SAP solutions.

To this end, the AI solution maps functional and technical relationships between elements such as SAP modules, application functions, infrastructure components, business processes and the corporate structure in a so-called blueprint.

This knowledge base is continuously expanded and updated. In this way, patterns are recognized, for example, how certain functionalities are used or in which areas errors occur.

Based on this information, the application is able to identify potential problems, including an assessment of the potential impact on critical business processes, and automatically resolve existing errors.

But cognitive solutions don't just handle routine processes or fix system risks in IT operations; they can also identify business risks such as compliance violations or credit risks.

Pilot projects show: The average time required for problem resolution is reduced from one to 20 hours to less than five minutes.

The consultants at McKinsey predict: In business areas such as IT, artificial intelligence can take over 30 percent of the activities. Thus, with the availability of big data and corresponding hardware that can process this data effectively, we are seeing a development in the IT department that began decades ago in factory floors:

Here, too, the use and further development of robotics have greatly changed certain fields of activity or have made traditional job descriptions almost extinct. Like robotics, artificial intelligence has the potential to enable productivity increases and will also necessitate changes in process flows.

However, I have not yet seen any specialist jobs being eliminated in the IT department as a result of automation. However, automation makes employees more productive, for example, by having the AI solution take over rule-based and repetitive tasks.

And even when jobs are eliminated, employers do not let employees go, but invest in further training. The reason is the employees' expertise about the company and the industry as well as the shortage of skilled workers:

SAP experts in particular are sought-after specialists. According to industry association Bitkom, there are currently a total of 51,000 vacancies for IT specialists in Germany, an increase of almost 20 percent compared with the previous year.

So it makes sense to automate the less demanding tasks. And I don't know any SAP expert who likes to monitor extensive job chains or the servers in the system landscape, or classify help desk tickets and assign them to the right experts.

And there are other areas where AI solutions can support IT specialists, such as applying patches and updates, user administration and authorization management, or data migration - and this list could go on. This leaves more time for more highly qualified activities - without the ballast of the routine tasks mentioned.