SAP recently unveiled new generative-AI capabilities for customer experience, including its digital assistant Joule, in an expansion of the SAP CX portfolio that also reflected the company’s recent push to leverage generative AI throughout its product ecosystem.
Introduced Oct. 25 during SAP CX Live, a virtual conference, the capabilities—both portfolio-wide AI capabilities and natively embedded AI features—included tailored use cases for commerce, sales, customer service, marketing, and customer success teams.
Aimed at helping businesses automate time-consuming tasks and quickly analyze data to create more intelligent, personalized customer experiences, the portfolio-wide AI capabilities will be accessible through both a standalone app and Joule, which SAP plans to embed across its entire suite of cloud solutions. Natively embedded features will be available within SAP Sales Cloud, SAP Service Cloud, SAP Commerce Cloud, SAP Emarsys Customer Engagement, and SAP Customer Data Platform solutions.
Among the announcements:
- More than 10 CX role-based tools intended to automate time-consuming and repetitive tasks
- AI-generated customer profiles driven by the SAP Customer Data Platform (CDP), enabled by native data connectivity across SAP S/4HANA and CX in SAP CDP
- Intelligent Q&A, using AI to identify and suggest answers to customer questions within active conversations, aimed at sales and service teams
- AI capabilities for catalog management and product discovery, including image-based semantic search and automatically generated product attributes and descriptions
- AI risk-based authentication capabilities for SAP Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) solutions, which secure end-user identity data and guard against potential threats across all platforms and brands, via a unified customer view and consent profile
- Personalized content creation for SAP Emarsys Customer Engagement platform
- AI-generated summary and email response generation for SAP Sales Cloud and SAP Service Cloud
The AI capabilities, which will largely become available in December 2023, will leverage data from third-party sources but also be trained on SAP’s experiential and operational data, and built on proprietary AI models and large language models (LLMs).
“These new AI capabilities within the SAP CX portfolio will allow businesses to unlock their full potential, improve customer loyalty, solidify themselves as industry leaders and reap the benefits of generative AI with intelligent CX solutions that have a tangible impact on businesses," said Ritu Bhargava, President and Chief Product Officer, SAP Industries and CX. "These capabilities are the next step in redefining intelligence to deliver a delightful customer experience, effortlessly.”
Bhargava added that the SAP CX strategy for AI will be driven by AI principles of "relevant, reliable, and responsible" decision-making, and the announcement of AI risk-based authentication capabilities for SAP CIAM solutions was in particular accompanied by discussion of maintaining customer data privacy and security as core tenets guiding the strategy.
The announcements advance the SAP roadmap for intelligent CX first unveiled at this year’s SAP Sapphire and ASUG Annual Conference, which similarly focused on how CX can be enhanced by the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and data. As SAP shifts its focus to cloud solutions, SAP CX has similarly evolved from its previous emphasis on traditional customer relationship management (CRM) functionality to pursue more cloud-centric, industry-specific CX.
Added Christian Klein, CEO and Member of the Executive Board of SAP SE: “Intelligent CX is industry-tailored, connected, insightful, and adaptive. These four pillars can create personalized customer experiences that deliver on customer expectations across all sales channels."
Meri Beth Dudich, Content Producer at ASUG, contributed to this report.