AI Future

Source and sink of innovations

The SAP community has a long tradition of sharing ideas and concepts between SAP itself and existing customers and partners. Innovations were usually located together and then realized by SAP programmers. Many innovative products were born together. The source was always the users together with SAP. The sink was the PKL. Many user ideas found their way onto the SAP price list.

This productive collaboration between SAP and users was lost in recent years: SAP became more and more commercial and often a dispute arose over intellectual property (IP). The result is sobering, because while SAP's existing customers came together in new communities, SAP lost touch with the cutting edge of information technology.

AI Future Prospects

When it comes to AI, the board members Christian Klein, Thomas Saueressig and Jürgen Müller are content with vague promises and shallow collaborations. The Handelsblatt writes: In the technology and product development departments of Jürgen Müller and Thomas Saueressig, of all people, which are supposed to develop innovations, many employees are critical of the Board of Management as well as the prospects for the future.

Only slightly more than half of SAP employees in Germany still believe in a positive future for the ERP world market leader. As reported by Handelsblatt, only 58 percent of German employees agreed with the statement "I am enthusiastic about SAP's future.

Where is SAP?

As a leader in the field of explainable AI, Aleph Alpha is taking on a significant role in the German nucleus for AI application developments. Europe's most relevant platform for applied AI will be created in the Innovation Park Artificial Intelligence (Ipai). Here, leading expertise, resources and innovations of the local AI landscape will come together and lay the foundation for Germany's competitiveness in the field of AI.

For the Dieter Schwarz Foundation (Lidl and Kaufland) as co-initiator of Ipai, it is a particular concern to secure Germany's digital sovereignty in one of the future key technologies with this AI ecosystem.

"With Ipai, we have gained a strong partner with a clear commitment to trustworthy and explainable AI," says Jonas Andrulis, founder and CEO of Aleph Alpha. "Combining our resources and expertise will put us in a unique position to shape the development of AI in Europe in a self-determined and sovereign way."

Investments without concept

SAP has announced a next step in its long-standing partnership with Microsoft. The companies will work together to integrate SAP SuccessFactors solutions with Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot in Viva Learning, as well as Microsoft's Azure OpenAI service, to access powerful language models that analyze and generate natural language. The investments in Aleph Alpha, Anthropic, and Cohere are intended to strengthen SAP's approach to AI with the goal of embedding the best AI technology into the portfolio.

SAP's AI strategy includes direct investments and partnerships with third-party vendors, such as those announced this May with Microsoft, Google Cloud and IBM. Aleph Alpha is a German-based company that has developed a comprehensive sovereign generative AI solution focused on complex and important enterprise use cases. Aleph Alpha was the first company to offer next-generation multimodal large-scale language models that are equally trained with multiple European languages.