Artificial Intelligence (AI) is seeping into our personal and business lives, sometimes without us even knowing it. Very quickly, genAI capabilities have already been embedded into the apps and products we use every day. And in the workplace, many organisations are now regularly using genAI in at least one or two corporate functions.

This powerful technology is playing a pivotal role in digital transformation enabling companies to evolve faster and be more competitive. With the use of machine learning, natural language processing and computer vision it is unlocking and reshaping the way businesses innovate and interact with their customers.

AI creates new opportunities to personalise interactions, make accurate predictions and optimise business operations, enabling organisations to extract actionable, valuable insights from their data. And with these genAI techniques rapidly improving, creating realistic text, images and other media is now a reality.

Core business system AI is quite different to consumer AI. It’s not about just being creative or planning the best week-end away, it’s how company’s best deploy and manage their resources. It’s about corporate reputation and the lifeblood of the organisation. With the business landscape evolving at an extremely fast pace, customers are faced with many challenges that demand increasingly innovative solutions. Being future-ready and resilient against unforeseen obstacles, such as increased cyber threats, skills shortages or meeting supply chain sustainability targets, are becoming the everyday norm.

AI technology is here to stay and already equipping customers with predictive analytics and scenario planning to enable them to anticipate and quickly navigate these and other potential challenges with precision.

Businesses are constantly striving to improve the customer experience. Salespeople are under pressure to answer customer questions faster, better and more accurately, without the need for the ubiquitous ‘I’ll get back to you’ statements. Resolving problems on first contact leaves customers feeling satisfied. But as younger generations come through the workforce, they are demanding more personal interactions with product experts and seeking active information from different sources when it comes to the buying process. Companies need to address these preferences as the 25-40 year olds move into decision-making roles. We need to pave the way for the next generation of the workforce, who will expect to leverage GenAI in ways we cannot yet imagine.

SAP is underpinning its strategic growth by accelerating AI development across SAP’s solutions. Recently launched genAI assistant SAP Joule, will be embedded in SAP’s full enterprise portfolio from early this year, including SAP S/4HANA and SAP Ariba and followed by its Business Technology Platform, fundamentally changing the way SAP users in the workplace interact with their ERP.

As with other AI assistants, when a user asks a question through native language and chat, the assistant delivers proactive and contextualised insights from across SAP’s solutions and third-party sources. Joule will improve over time as the global SAP user community, including 28,000+ customers and 300 million SAP users, feeds key information to ‘teach’ the assistant.

SAP has built AI into its supply chain solutions giving customers predictive maintenance capability, the ability to forecast and predict customer demand and detect anomalies. These AI-driven insights and recommendations will contribute to enhanced decision-making, improved efficiency, and better supply chain outcomes.

Joule will become the de facto standard for all its SAP products and applications, forever changing the enterprise ERP landscape.

Launched early last year, Copilot offers a similar experience for Microsoft users. It works to improve operational efficiency, employee productivity and collaboration by combining the power of large language models (LLMs) and a company’s organisational data and is embedded in Microsoft 365 apps including Word, Excel, PowerPoint Teams and Outlook.

With Copilot, it helps users navigate applications more efficiently, improving productivity and enriching the customer and employee experience. It is easier to generate documents and PowerPoint presentations, by providing insightful, accurate content from across the organisation. Users can also ask questions, drawing on a distributed knowledge base.

With the use of this Microsoft AI tool, users are empowered in their roles and daily activities, supporting modern work. It impacts across all functions, from reducing administrative tasks for sales, an improved customer experience from Customer Service, more engaging content from marketing and more optimised Supply Chain processes and resources. In addition, the AI assistants support developers by helping streamline workflows with intelligent code suggestions, problem-solving and debugging.

The impact of AI embedded in Codestone’s cloud solutions has already been transformative on our customers’ businesses. From automating tasks such as accounts payable, expense management through to budgeting and cyber security, AI-enabled technology is already performing a whole range of tasks previously done by humans.

Helping our customers innovate and evolve to overcome challenges has been the cornerstone of our business for 25 years. As we work with customers to prepare for an AI future, we are seeing increased excitement about its potential to progress and transform, to drive scalable growth and solve complex business challenges. The business applications and cloud services that Codestone provides are positively transforming organisations and helping mobilise and empowering workforces.

The potential for AI to drive innovation, productivity and the overall experience is a game changer. It will transform businesses and rather than replace workforces, it will strengthen them.

As such, AI is fast becoming a top priority across organisations to achieve a competitive edge, and although there are significant benefits, it is still a relatively new innovation. It’s important to plan carefully and responsibly on how your organisation adopts and realises the value of this exciting technology.