The Future of SAP BTP and AI
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You’ve made your bed, now lie in it
This popular saying, used by many over the years, means everyone must accept the consequences of their own actions; however, since people are responsible for their own actions, they are also responsible for shaping their own destiny. Perhaps Saueressig meant something similar when, at this year's World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, SAP Executive Board member Thomas Saueressig told Christof Kerkmann, editor of the German business newspaper Handelsblatt: "You shape your own future."
This statement may come as a surprise to members of the SAP community, as SAP is not shaping the future of AI itself, but rather has entered into numerous partnerships with AI providers such as Microsoft, IBM, Google, Amazon, and OpenAI. This may save SAP millions in development costs, but the global ERP market leader is making itself dependent on the innovations and AI knowledge of its competitors.
For SAP customers, SAP's AI strategy is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it raises the question of why customers should go through SAP for AI services when they could go directly to IBM, OpenAI, or Google. On the other hand, SAP has very attractively positioned a broad AI offering in BTP, the SAP Business Technology Platform.
AI and SAP BTP
The SAP Business Technology Platform serves many purposes, and a key function of BTP is to provide an AI hub. SAP users can build their own applications on top of BTP, using the BTP AI framework to provide different LLMs (large language models).
In practice, it may turn out that the applications meet SAP customers’ needs, but the LLM does not provide the necessary precision and information value. It only takes a few minutes to replace the AI model (LLM) in a Fiori/BTP application. This flexibility is a huge value-add. SAP Business Technology Platform provides multiple frameworks and programming languages for modifying and extending ERP. Many aspects of BTP, including licensing challenges, will be discussed at the SAP Community’s Steampunk and BTP Summit on March 5-6, 2025, in Heidelberg, Germany—register now!
Why SAP steampunk
Steampunk is all about transparency, agility, and the future. Typical images of the genre show gears, magnifying glasses, steam boilers, and mechanical machines as they are—no hiding, obfuscating, or disguising! SAP technology is often hidden behind buzzwords, licenses, and clouds. We shed light on the Abap, BTP, and the clean core scene. Steampunk was an internal Abap development project at SAP and is now an E3 education and transparency initiative. Register now for the Steampunk and BTP Summit 2025 on March 5 and 6 in Heidelberg, Germany.
Transparency seems to be an imperative in the AI scene right now, and the surprising appearance of DeepSeek has created a lot of uncertainty. Is SAP's path of numerous AI partnerships the right one? Or should the IT provider not develop its own LLM, as demonstrated by the AI translation provider DeepL? DeepSeek has apparently proven that a powerful LLM can be realized with less effort. SAP CEO Christian Klein should reconsider his opinion on AI and perhaps have his own SAP LLM developed.
Suite 7, Hana, BTP, and AI
The SAP Business Technology Platform has been a household name and success in the SAP community for several years and has become popular due to the specifications of an S/4 with a clean core and the possibility of a development platform for Abap modifications (Steampunk).
However, SAP BTP is also a standalone framework that can function very well alongside SAP Business Suite 7. The well-known combination of Suite and Hana (SoH, Suite on Hana) is widespread among SAP customers, which opens up the opportunity to expand with BTP. There are now many SAP customers who have not yet migrated to S/4, but are successfully using SoH and BTP. Since BTP is well established in the SAP community, there will be a conference in Heidelberg on March 5 and 6., the Steampunk and BTP Summit 2025. Register now here. This is the meeting place of the SAP!