Low-hanging fruit for the use of AI?

AI is on everyone's lips and in every company - or is it not yet? It is often said in the SAP world that the hype surrounding generative AI systems is attracting a lot of attention from companies, but that they are still looking for suitable areas of application. DSAG recently emphasized in its statements that integrating AI into existing products to improve their functionality makes sense and can be helpful. However, according to the DSAG spokespersons, there is still a long way to go between vision and reality.

It doesn't make sense for every company to go straight for the big wheel when it comes to AI, just as it doesn't make sense for every piece of software to implement its own AI. Above all, the AI solutions of central company systems, including those from SAP, will (have to) undergo substantial further development in order to increase their business suitability. Ancillary systems such as archiving and document management platforms, on the other hand, should see themselves as important suppliers for the leading systems. AI can be used to analyze masses of data, including data stored in company archives - a possible starting point for the journey to an AI-enhanced company.

AI use cases in archiving

The use of AI is particularly useful when analyzing structured and unstructured data and deriving forecasts from it. Every company has the necessary data gold in stock: in its archives. However, suitable software must be used to create a place - a database - that is "barrier-free" for AI and compliant at the same time. The keyword is: Single Point of Truth (SPoT) for all data and documents in the company. After all, only sufficiently complete data can enable valid forecasts or support applications such as streamlining.

On this basis, the AI could, for example, help to identify and categorize data protection-relevant content. The data protection officer would not miss anything and the AI could even recommend measures. Or how about using AI to automatically manage retention periods? Many other scenarios are conceivable here.

SAP and SharePoint

The use of a high-performance archive is recommended for the numerous documents created and edited in SAP. And what about the documents that circulate in SharePoint? The fact is: SharePoint, Teams and other Microsoft services have become an integral part of daily business. While meetings are held in Teams, data is usually exchanged via SharePoint. Documents play a central role in these processes - including those that are subject to legal retention requirements and whose immutability must be guaranteed over a long period of time. However, the safeguards provided by Microsoft are not always sufficient.

Companies should therefore proactively provide an audit-proof archiving alternative. Archiving software is needed that has a connector to SharePoint so that users can archive their SharePoint and SAP documents reliably and compliantly without much effort. In this way, the document worlds of both major applications can be merged in companies and the database for the company's own AI application is broadened. Archiving solutions, such as Tia from SAP partner KGS, connect the worlds of the leading applications, simplify the system landscape and make it easier to use the data for AI.

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