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When SAP ran a quiet inner experiment to gauge advisor attitudes towards AI, the outcomes had been hanging. 5 groups had been requested to validate solutions to greater than 1,000 enterprise necessities accomplished by SAP’s AI co-pilot, Joule for Consultants — a workload that will usually take a number of weeks.
4 groups had been informed the evaluation had been accomplished by junior interns contemporary out of college. They reviewed the fabric, discovered it spectacular, and rated the work about 95% correct.
The fifth group was informed the exact same solutions had come from AI.
They rejected nearly all the things.
Solely when requested to validate every reply one after the other did they uncover that the AI was, actually, extremely correct — surfacing detailed insights the consultants had initially dismissed. The general accuracy? Once more, about 95%.
“The lesson discovered right here is that we must be very cautious as we introduce AI — particularly in how we talk with senior consultants about its prospects and how you can combine it into their workflows,” says Guillermo B. Vazquez Mendez, chief architect, RI enterprise transformation and structure, SAP America Inc.
The experiment has since develop into a revealing start line for SAP’s push towards the advisor of 2030: a practitioner who’s deeply human, enabled by AI, and now not weighed down by the technical grunt work of the previous.
Overcoming AI skepticism
Resistance isn’t stunning, Vazquez notes. Consultants with two or three many years of expertise carry monumental institutional information — and an comprehensible diploma of warning.
However AI copilots like Joule for Consultants will not be changing experience. They’re amplifying it.
“What Joule actually does is make their very costly time far simpler,” Vazquez says. “It removes the clerical work, to allow them to give attention to turning out high-quality solutions in a fraction of the time.”
He emphasizes this message continually: “AI isn’t changing you. It’s a instrument for you. Human oversight is at all times required. However now, as an alternative of spending your time in search of documentation, you’re gaining important time and boosting the effectiveness and element of your solutions.”
The advisor time-shift: from tech execution to enterprise perception
Traditionally, consultants spent about 80% of their time understanding technical techniques — how processes run, how knowledge flows, how capabilities execute. Clients, in contrast, spend 80% of their time targeted on their enterprise.
That mismatch is precisely the place Joule steps in.
“There’s a spot there — and the bridge is AI,” Vazquez says. “It flips the time equation, enabling consultants to take a position extra of their power in understanding the client’s business and enterprise objectives. AI takes on the heavy technical raise, so consultants can give attention to driving the best enterprise outcomes.”
Bringing new consultants on top of things
AI can also be remodeling how new hires be taught.
“We’re excited to see Joule appearing as a bridge between senior consultants, who’re adapting extra slowly, and interns and new consultants who’re already technically savvy,” Vazquez says.
Junior consultants ramp up quicker as a result of Joule helps them function independently. Seniors, in the meantime, have interaction the place their perception issues most.
That is additionally the place many consultants be taught the basics of in the present day’s AI copilots. A lot of the work is determined by immediate engineering — for example, instructing Joule to behave as a senior chief know-how architect specializing in finance and SAP S/4HANA 2023, then asking it to research enterprise necessities and ship the output as tables or PowerPoint slides.
As soon as they grasp how you can body prompts, consultants constantly get higher-quality, extra structured solutions.
New architects are additionally capable of talk extra clearly with their extra skilled counterparts. They know what they don’t know and may ask focused questions, which makes mentorship far smoother. It’s created an actual synergy, Vazquez provides — senior consultants see how rapidly new hires are adapting and studying with AI, and that momentum encourages them to maintain tempo and undertake the know-how themselves.
Looking forward to the way forward for AI copilots
“We’re nonetheless within the child steps of AI — we’re toddlers,” Vazquez says. “Proper now, copilots rely on immediate engineering to get good solutions. The higher you immediate, the higher the reply you get.”
However that represents solely the earliest section of what these techniques will ultimately do. As copilots mature, they’ll transfer past responding to prompts and begin decoding total enterprise processes — understanding the sequence of steps, figuring out the place human intervention is required, and recognizing the place an AI agent might take over. That shift is what leads instantly into agentic AI.
SAP’s depth of course of information is what makes that evolution attainable. The corporate has mapped greater than 3,500 enterprise processes throughout industries — a repository Vazquez calls “a few of the most dear, rigorously examined processes developed within the final 50 years.” Day by day, SAP techniques assist roughly $7.3 trillion in international commerce, giving these rising AI brokers a wealthy basis to navigate and purpose over.
“With that stage of course of perception and knowledge, we will take an actual leap ahead,” he says, “equipping our consultants with agentic AI that may clear up advanced challenges and push us towards more and more autonomous techniques.”
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