The following guest perspective was authored by Bob Evans, Founder of Cloud Wars and Co-Founder of the Acceleration Economy.
Just when the tech industry was starting to confuse business customers with its blitz of AI assistants, copilots, agents, orchestrators, and more, SAP has announced plans to enhance its Joule copilot with advanced agentic AI capabilities that will help customers become more productive.
While I can understand the excitement and enthusiasm some tech companies are expressing about all the latest AI discoveries, I think certain gung-ho tech vendors were losing sight of what customers want more than anything else from AI: great business outcomes — not head-spinning, whizbang technology.
Those outcomes won't automatically pop into reality just because a company is using AI technology—and from my conversations with business technology leaders, as well as with executives outside of tech teams, I believe most companies have significant work to do in actively and aggressively preparing for massive changes coming with the AI era.
This is an area I had the opportunity to explore last week in West Palm Beach, at ASUG Tech Connect, where I participated in a fireside chat entitled “Embracing AI: Cultural Shifts for the Future of Work.” It’s clear that achieving meaningful business outcomes with AI requires more than just implementing the technology — it demands proactive planning and adaptation across the organization. For example: if AI can liberate six to seven hours per week for every salesperson in your organization, what's the plan for what those salespeople will do with all that free time?
AI is expected to boost productivity and efficiency across every part of the enterprise. How will this change internal workflows — and are your teams fully prepared for that? As the type of work changes for many/most/all employees, is your chief human resources officer equipped with the necessary data and insights to determine what new types of talent you'll need?
Can traditional "change management" approaches handle the new requirements of businesses facing relentless change? Or is it time to consider a different perspective such as "change optimization" that helps people master constant change?
Is your CEO helping to drive a culture that is AI-curious? AI-supportive? Or AI-first? And how will that choice impact your company's ability to compete in the very different world that's rushing at us?
For all the dazzling progress tens of thousands of businesses are making with AI initiatives, this whole AI phenomenon is—believe it or not—barely a couple of years old, with its meaningful impact on enterprises only about 12 to 18 months old. Seen that way, through the eyes of customers, the look-at-my-latest-shiny-new-object craze that has swept parts of the tech industry seems jarringly out of sync with what business leaders want and need in a global economy that is turbulent, disruptive, unpredictable, and moving faster than ever before.
That's why I applaud SAP for stepping back from all the hype and deciding to give customers access to the next big wave of tech innovation—agents—through new AI technology with which many customers have already become quite comfortable: the Joule copilot.
SAP could have succumbed to the temptation to jump on a soapbox and yell, "Hey customers—just as you're starting to figure out how to unleash Joule as a great business tool, we're going to throw more untested but highly hyped AI in your laps with a new army of agents that will do everything copilots can do but even better!"
Instead, consider this excerpt from the SAP press release breaking down the interplay between Joule and new agents:
"SAP announces that it will infuse Joule, its generative AI copilot, with multiple autonomous AI agents that will combine their unique expertise across business functions to collaboratively accomplish complex workflows. Available in Q4 2024, these AI agents will help organizations unlock massive productivity gains by breaking down silos and freeing workers to collaborate on areas where human ingenuity thrives."
As you can see, SAP's decision to go with this Joule-goes-agentic approach is surely not tamping down the company's enthusiasm for what customers can achieve through the combination of SAP's end-to-end applications plus its fast-growing capabilities for the new and improved agentic AI for Joule.
In fact, in its slew of new product announcements at SAP TechEd (one of which involved the expansion of Joule to encompass AI agents, SAP went to great lengths to underscore how its new and enhanced copilot will be fused with SAP's enterprise apps and its impressive data-platform services.
As I see it, that's what customers care about most: squeezing out of their SAP apps every bit of insight, innovation, and opportunity available. And SAP should continue—diligently and relentlessly—to express the power of agentic AI for Joule through its integration with SAP's cloud apps and SAP Datasphere platform.
In today's blindingly fast and increasingly unpredictable world, business leaders aren't really interested in "copilot projects" or "agent projects" or "LLMs for Dummies"—no, those leaders are interested in enhancing their ability to use AI-charged SAP applications to grow, to dazzle customers, to move faster than ever before.
And any tech vendor that loses sight of those customers’ priorities and gets overly infatuated with its own glitzy AI gizmos will be in for a world of hurt when customers look elsewhere for what they care about most: delivering superb business outcomes.
Founder of Cloud Wars and Co-Founder of the Acceleration Economy, Bob leads the strategic direction of the global analyst network and actively covers the Cloud and Digital Business categories. Creator of Cloud Wars Top 10, a ranking and ongoing analysis world's most influential tech companies driving digital business and the digital economy. World-class strategic communicator focused on emerging business strategy, disruptive innovation, and forward-looking leadership.