News

SAP, Salesforce Duel with Same-Day AI Tools

• By David Ramel
• 03/08/2024

Advanced AI technology is springing up all over, including the enterprise software mix.

SAP and Salesforce both provide various cloud-based products and services in areas such as customer relationship management (CRM), and both announced AI-powered offerings on the same day at corporate events this week.

SAP announced data and analytics solutions during a virtual company event on Wednesday, while Salesforce announced a Data Cloud update along with Einstein 1 Studio, a low-code AI tool for customizing the company's Einstein Copilot assistant and embedding AI into any CRM app.

"Salesforce admins and developers can now build, customize, and embed AI across every Salesforce app and workflow, including Einstein Copilot, the company said in a news release from its TrailblazerDX developer conference in San Francisco. "Einstein 1 Studio is deeply integrated with Data Cloud, which unlocks and unifies trapped data and grounds AI models with a comprehensive understanding of customer data and metadata."

That Data Cloud, meanwhile, was unveiled in its latest version, the Data Cloud Spring '24 Release.

"Data Cloud makes it possible to connect data from any source or data lake and use it within the applications that business users need to use every day," the company said. "This is possible because Data Cloud is built on Salesforce's foundational metadata layer, which provides a common language that integrates all Salesforce applications and low-code platform services including Einstein AI, Flow for automation, Lightning for UI, and Apex for deep, pro-code customization."

Speaking of the company's Einstein AI, the newly available Einstein 1 Studio sports three components for the usual AI tasks.

"Einstein 1 Studio includes Copilot Builder for creating custom AI actions to accomplish specific business tasks, Prompt Builder for building and activating custom prompts in the flow of work, and Model Builder, where users can build or import a variety of AI models," Salesforce said. "This enables businesses to deliver trusted AI experiences across Salesforce's Einstein 1 Platform that are tailored to their customers' needs."

SAP Generative-AI Copilot and AI Governance
"SAP's generative-AI assistant, the Joule copilot, is now coming to the SAP Analytics Cloud solution to automate the creation and development of reports, dashboards, plans and more," the company announced during its SAP Data Unleashed event. "This automation is enabled by the SAP HANA Cloud vector engine capabilities, which combine the power of large language models with the relevant data of your organization -- helping ensure business context is a constant for generative-AI outputs."

Another SAP cloud solution, SAP Datasphere, was updated with a new knowledge graph. Datasphere is described as a next-generation offshoot of the company's SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, with new capabilities that enhance data discovery, modeling and distribution. Knowledge graphs, meanwhile, can provide better context to large language models (LLMs) used to power advanced generative AI systems and prevent AI-generated "hallucinations," the company said.

"SAP Datasphere knowledge graph will enable organizations to better represent their real-world use of data, leading to more effectively leveraging it for generative AI and better reasoning," the company said in a separate post. "As data is onboarded, transformed, and integrated in SAP Datasphere, SAP Datasphere knowledge graph automatically creates an ontology representing the relationships in the data, including the inherent business context from SAP application sources like SAP S/4HANA. This is then available to be extended and augmented via an ontology editor to reflect specific attributes within an organization. Finally, the data in SAP Datasphere is automatically applied to this ontology to create a knowledge graph that allows the data to be processed as a semantic web of relationships, drawing new insights from connections that are otherwise difficult to follow."

SAP also announced a vector engine for its SAP HANA Cloud that provides the ability to store and compare vectors using SQL, along with simplified consumption of data products in SAP Datasphere and enhancements to SAP Datasphere semantic onboarding, or importing semantically rich objects from SAP S/4HANA and SAP BW/4HANA into Datasphere.

Other news includes a partnership with Collibra for AI governance integration, said to enable "end-to-end data governance" and deliver "trusted data to all users across the business data fabric."

All of the same-day announcements indicate AI is making deep inroads into both on-premises and cloud-based software and services, so stay tuned for more.