What Does SAP Understand About AI?

Signavio and Aleph Alpha are a dream team

At the German magazine Handelsblatt’s AI conference in Munich at the end of November, Aleph Alpha CEO Jonas Andrulis declared SAP's business knowledge, Signavio's process expertise, and Aleph Alpha's AI model to be the dream team in the professional ERP market. "No other company knows as much about business processes as Signavio," was his statement, pointing out the importance of the right training data for generative AI.

The dream team—SAP, Signavio, and Aleph Alpha—results in patterns for a large language model, which is then used in business process management. "These patterns are captured by the deep learning model and form a high-dimensional distribution," explains Jonas Andrulis, founder and CEO of Aleph Alpha, in the Handelsblatt special publication on the future of IT and AI (August 2023), adding: "Mapping this distribution creates a kind of map of meaning with a significant numerical neighborhood where different words and texts are given small or large distances in high-dimensional space based on similar meanings."

Jürgen Müller and the vectors

At TechEd 2023 in Bangalore, India, SAP Chief Technology Officer Jürgen Müller emphasized the importance of multidimensional vectors for clustering commonalities. According to him, the database platform will be receiving an extension to be able to calculate with vectors. As already indicated in the quote from Jonas Andrulis, the distances (e.g. Euclidean distance, see https://e3mag.com/de/euklid-und-hana/) of vectors in high-dimensional space to create similarities, i.e. clusters, and thus maps of meaning.

Even if it is difficult to imagine a vector in high-dimensional space, and it is no problem for mathematicians to calculate dimensional numbers in the three-digit range, normal imagination already fails in the fourth dimension: A cube in the fourth dimension not only has four edges that are all at 90 degrees to each other, but its shadow would be a three-dimensional cube.

Orientation with AI maps

Even if it is difficult to imagine a vector in high-dimensional space, and it is no problem for mathematicians to calculate dimensional numbers in the three-digit range, normal imagination already fails in the fourth dimension: a cube in the fourth dimension not only has four edges that are all at 90 degrees to each other, but its shadow would be a three-dimensional cube.

Many things can be seen at once on a map of meaning. It remains to be seen what SAP will make of it. SAP is sure to get help from Aleph Alpha. Currently, SAP CEO Christian Klein still favors the topic of cloud only, but very few members of the SAP community are interested in this. There is a risk that SAP's customers will quickly turn to the new AI topics and SAP will suffer a second shipwreck, as it did with Leonardo many years ago. Christian Klein should leave the topic of cloud computing to others and focus on AI alongsides Andrulis. The community is waiting for an SAP map of meaning.