Committed to enabling its customers with AI-enhanced solutions, SAP recently announced new AI capabilities for ABAP (or Advanced Business Application Programming, SAP's proprietary language for application development), allowing developers to leverage Joule, SAP’s generative AI copilot, to improve—and accelerate—the ABAP development process.
Built on specific large language models (LLMs) trained on extensive ABAP code, these capabilities enable ABAP developers to tackle everyday coding hurdles effectively and quickly. SAP customers leveraging SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) ABAP environment and SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition, have access to these new functions, free of charge, until September 15.
In an exclusive conversation with ASUG, Dr. Alexander Rother, Head of BTP ABAP Product Management at SAP, discussed how these new capabilities represent the “next step in the evolution of ABAP Cloud,” following recent ABAP developments, including the addition of ABAP environments to SAP Build announced at last year's SAP TechEd.
“There’s been a lot of attention on when, finally, ABAP will be supported by Joule,” Dr. Rother said.
Now, ABAP coders can leverage Joule to accomplish complex and time-consuming tasks, including code completion and explanation and automated unit test generation. Users can now rely on Joule’s chat function, which is now embedded in ABAP Development Tools for Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE), to supplement and assist with their coding projects.
Dr. Rother walked ASUG through the specifics of this announcement, highlighted new exciting functions and use cases for ABAP developers, and laid out how ASUG members can begin taking advantage of these new ABAP AI capabilities. Here are some key takeaways:
Core ABAP AI Use Cases
According to Dr. Rother, SAP is “clustering” these new capabilities into three specific use cases for customers. “The first use case is concentrating on everything that accelerates the everyday work of an ABAP developer,” he said, further noting that the Joule integration in ABAP development tools enables chat functionality for users.
Dr. Rother said that developers can leverage the Joule chat to interact with human language with Joule to jumpstart or solve complex tasks such as unit test generation, or understanding and explaining ABAP and CDS code. Furthermore, with the predictive code completion skill, Joule provides coding proposals for developers within the IDE while they are typing.
The new capabilities also enable users—both SAP customers and partners—to develop their own AI use cases, specific to their own requirements and demands. To enable that process, Dr. Rother noted that SAP needed to develop an integration to the LLMs hosted in SAP BTP Generative AI Hub.
As opposed to developing different integrations for each specific use case, SAP built a single ABAP AI software development kit (SDK) to integrate the AI Hub in ABAP. The SDK, powered by the Intelligent Scenario Lifecycle Management (ISLM), enables developers to build ABAP scenarios leveraging any generative AI model they choose from the hub. “All the skills we develop for our ABAP developers all use that single SDK,” Dr. Rother said. “It’s the central entry point for LLM models for ABAP AI functionality.” The utility spurred by this SDK is significant, enabling developers to easily infuse generative AI into their business applications. “The SDK is really the foundation for all generative AI use cases in ABAP,” Dr Rother said.
Finally, the third use case is focused on transforming custom and partner ABAP code to help customers drive two specific digital transformations: migrating from SAP ERP Central Component (ECC) to SAP S/4HANA and adopting a clean core critical to embracing cloud environments. Speaking specifically to the transition from SAP ECC to S/4HANA, Dr. Rother noted that the process demands that developers work through simplification items step-by-step.
“You must judge what kind of code adaptions are required for your custom extensions according to a certain simplification item,” he said. “That is a lot of manual work.”
Access to the LLMs in SAP BTP Generative AI Hub will significantly help enterprises speed up this time-consuming work and drive down consultancy costs usually associated with this process. When it comes to establishing a clean core, Dr. Rother said that much of customer and partner ABAP code is written in classic ABAP and has been “piling up” in enterprises’ IT infrastructure for decades.
This code must be painstakingly transformed into new code for the “cloud-first world,” he said. Joule will help in this transformation by explaining simplification items, proposing coding changes, or by finding the proper APIs necessary to embrace the cloud.
Developing and Evaluating LLMs
Since ABAP is a proprietary coding language—and therefore protected by intellectual property laws unlike other coding languages—Dr. Rother noted that developers cannot solely lean on public models. “This is one reason why having Joule copilot functionality for ABAP may be a little harder than for other coding languages,” he said.
To remedy this issue, SAP trained its LLMs internally on millions of lines of ABAP code from SAP S/4HANA. “We are really proud of our own fine-tuned LLMs,” Dr. Rother said. “We can deliver our use cases based on our own ABAP LLM.”
As SAP internally develops these LLMs, it takes pains to constantly evaluate them, and ensure they are the right tool for the right processes. Dr. Rother spoke about the ABAP AI benchmark effort, where the ABAP team is constantly evaluating and fine-tuning the LLMs developed for ABAP developers. “The LLMs you use for a specific use case are always tied to that certain use case, and they are optimized for something special.” he said. “If you really want to have the best set of LLMs behind your use cases, you have to continuously evaluate, retrain, and fine-tune.”
Of course, in addition, feedback from ABAP developers at SAP developing new SAP S/4HANA versions is very valuable. “We took their expertise to judge whether the responses of LLMs make sense and are viable,” he said.
Using ABAP AI Capabilities
Currently, SAP customers leveraging SAP BTP ABAP Environment and SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition, can use the Joule capabilities at no extra—via a voucher—until September 15. Later this year, customers leveraging SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition, will also gain access to these capabilities.
The ABAP AI SDK is available now to public cloud customers of SAP S/4HANA and for customers of SAP BTP ABAP Environment, along with enterprises leveraging SAP S/4HANA, private edition, and on-premises release 2021 onward. To learn more, please contact your SAP representative.
Read more in Dr. Rother’s blog post.