SAP TechEd 2023: Every Developer Is a Generative AI Developer

At SAP TechEd 2023, SAP unveiled new features and innovations in generative AI designed to empower developers, regardless of skill level, to drive their businesses forward in the AI era.

"The technology landscape and the business world today is very dynamic. This requires every developer to be an AI developer. At SAP TechEd, we are showcasing numerous innovations - from AI-powered pro-code tools to a centralized location for developing extensions and applications on the SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) that use generative AI. Developers playing a central role in the AI revolution will thus have the resources they need to transform the way businesses operate from the ground up."

Jürgen Müller, Chief Technology Officer and Member of the Executive Board, SAP.

For businesses to benefit from generative AI, it is critical that professional developers and citizen developers work together effectively. SAP is launching Build Code solutions to improve collaboration with business units that are already using the low-code Build solutions demonstrated at SAP TechEd 2022. Built specifically for SAP applications and partners, Build Code provides AI-powered developer productivity tools and is optimized for Java and JavaScript development. The solutions also leverage the potential of SAP's new Joule assistant, which is based on generative AI and understands the business context of companies like no other copilot. The goal is to use it to further increase productivity by embedding code generation capabilities to create data models, application logic, and test scripts.

New vector database capabilities have been added to the multi-model offerings for Hana Cloud at no additional cost. Vector databases manage unstructured data such as text, images, or audio. The goal is to provide long-term storage and better context for AI models. Similar objects can be found and retrieved quickly and easily. For example, users can search for suppliers based on their contracts to analyze their payment history and track individual orders. These new vector database capabilities improve the interaction between large language models and an organization's business-critical data. With these innovations, SAP developers can gain new insights into data in a secure, private environment that reduces AI hallucinations using industry-specific customer data.

AI Foundation on BTP is a new centralized location for developers to build extensions and applications that leverage AI and generative AI on BTP. The AI Foundation includes everything developers need to build out-of-the-box AI tools on BTP—from ready-to-use AI services and access to the major large-scale language models, to vector database capabilities, to AI runtime and lifecycle management.

Rapid technological progress has created a strong global demand for skilled developers. In response, SAP continues to expand its learning offerings. Building on its announcement to train two million developers by 2025 and the free AI learning content already available, SAP announced a new role-based certification and free learning offerings for back-end developers using the ABAP cloud development model. The two new learning offerings for ABAP development tools on the BTP and S/4 Hana are available on the SAP Learning website.

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