SAP, IBM Consulting partner to offer genAI-based services

IBM’s consulting arm and SAP are partnering to offer generative AI-based services to enterprises to help accelerate digital transformation.

The partnership, announced on Wednesday, will see both companies offer generative AI-based services via RISE with SAP offering, the companies said in a statement.

RISE with SAP is the enterprise resource planning (ERP) software provider’s managed offering that helps enterprises move their on-premises ERP operations to the cloud.

Earlier in May last year, SAP partnered with IBM to infuse the latter’s Watson AI engine across its solutions portfolio, including SAP S/4 HANA, S/4 HANA Cloud, SAP Business One, and SAP Business ByDesign.  

That move was expected to help SAP exploit the natural language processing capabilities of Watson AI along with predictive insights, with the aim of jointly developing large language models (LLMs) and generative AI capabilities.

Thursday’s partnership, according to the companies, will help them jointly provide generative AI use cases and services to enterprises for business processes and platform architecture.

“Initially, IBM plans to extend AI capabilities across SAP’s portfolio of cloud solutions and applications, all of which are underpinned by SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP),” the companies said.

These applications and offerings include RISE with SAP, GROW with SAP offering, financial services for the office of the CFO, supply chain management services, human capital management, SAP Customer Experience and intelligent spend management offerings. 

IBM also plans to leverage SAP Signavio and SAP Business AI solutions to help define next-generation business processes through a proof-of-concept adoption program, the companies said.

Targeting new industry use cases

Additionally, both companies said the partnership would help them foster innovation for several industry sectors, with an initial focus on industrial manufacturing, consumer packaged goods (CPG), retail, defense, automotive, and utilities industries.

“As part of this initiative, IBM has begun the development of an extensive portfolio of over 100 AI solutions across industry, line-of-business and product delivery,” the companies said, adding that enterprises will be able to access all of these new AI solutions through the global IBM Innovation Studios and SAP Experience Center sites.

In order to onboard enterprises, the companies have devised a value-generation initiative.

“Through the Value Generation partnership initiative, IBM intends to provide next-generation reference architectures that enable a clean core approach. To do this, IBM plans to leverage SAP BTP, SAP Signavio, and LeanIX offerings,” the companies said, adding that the new reference architectures will define standards across data, process, systems, process orchestration, and automation.

Further, the companies said that IBM consultants supporting enterprise clients on SAP projects can also leverage IBM Consulting Advantage, IBM’s AI services platform, and its portfolio of proprietary methods, assets and Assistants.

The collaboration will also see SAP access IBM’s Granite family of large language models to develop AI use cases.