Autonomous S/5 Hana

ERP Treasure Island on the Web

We were wrong: none of us learned to drive theoretically! From the books we learned the technology and the traffic regulations, but we had to drive a real car on real roads.

Engine technology, car body construction, traffic rules can be found on the web and can be absorbed, copied and classified by any AI. A human and an AI can only drive a car sufficiently well after thousands of kilometers on real roads with different weather and lighting conditions - here, the AI hardly seems to be superior to us.

Business Administration

A perfect ERP system is theoretically a simple task. If you have enough time and energy, you can read all the business literature. Data on organizational theory, financial systems, logistics and production can also be found sufficiently on the web. So it is likely that the entire ERP, SCM and CRM knowledge of an SAP system, including the programming instructions for Abap, can be found on the Web. If this "reference book knowledge" is supplemented by reports from the SAP community, the result is an S/4 successor that is likely to be universal.

On the subject of AI and ChatGPT, Handelsblatt online read: "When trying to push it to its limits, it keeps discovering unexpected capabilities. For example, ChatGPT can write code on command in the Abap programming language, which is only used in SAP applications and is therefore something for specialists."

Go like ERP

A few years ago, Google experimented with an AI that was supposed to master the board game Go. After a relatively short training phase, the Google Go AI was better than any human player and the machine made moves that experts present thought were crazy - yet the Google machine won in the end. But it got even better: In a second attempt, the AI was given only the fundamental Go rules. From then on, the machine played non-stop against itself and in a few months acquired the entire Go literature of the past millennia.

ERP Genius

It should therefore be an easy exercise for ChatGPT to become an ERP genius within a few months with the business, organizational, technical and licensing literature available on the web and really know the answer to every challenge. Transferring this knowledge into Abap and testing it should be possible in another few months.

S/5 successor

An AI that programs the best ERP system of all time currently seems like a pipe dream. However, if the idea is continued that all the knowledge for a perfect ERP system is available on the web and ChatGPT has access to it, then it only appears to be a question of available resources. Will SAP now license ChatGPT and provide a suitable supercomputer to be able to present the perfect S/4 successor in a few years?