SAP Build gains AI capabilities to help build autonomous agents

SAP wants developers to view its Build platform as the one extension solution for all of SAP’s applications, according to Michael Aneling, chief product officer for SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP).

At its TechEd event this week it is showing a new extensibility wizard, now available, that gives developers access to SAP Build directly from S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, enabling them to extend custom fields, business logic, and processes either within the S/4HANA Cloud ABAP environment or in SAP BTP.

“A critical feature of this integration is the knowledge of business context — such as events and objects — when creating business processes and while transitioning between SAP S/4HANA and SAP Build,” SAP noted. “This preserves important business information, letting developers seamlessly switch between environments without losing crucial context.”

By year-end, the extensibility wizard will enable developers to create custom SAP Fiori and SAPUI5 applications as well.

Around the same time, SAP will release Joule studio in SAP Build, which will provide a dedicated environment for businesses to create, deploy, monitor and manage custom skills for its AI copilot, Joule. Custom skills, which complement Joule’s out-of-the-box capabilities, will extend conversational AI to organization-specific workflows.

Third-party AI integrations

Additionally, customers will be able to integrate any third-party system into Joule to create what SAP described as “an entirely integrated conversational user experience.”

Joule will also be integrated into SAP Build Work Zone, a low-code tool for creating web sites. Joule’s generative AI capabilities will provide support while navigating data from connected business systems. All this will be available in SAP Build Work Zone standard edition, the SAP Start site, and the SAP Mobile Start app.

New capabilities such as code explanation and documentation search in SAP Build Code will assist Java and JavaScript developers, who will also be able to automate workflows in SAP Build Process Automation, with assistance from generative AI.

Early next year, SAP plans to extend Joule to help developers using ABAP (Advanced Business Application Programming), SAP’s high-level programming language, to generate high-quality code and unit tests that comply with SAP’s ABAP Cloud development model. Joule will also be able to generate explanations for legacy code, to ease the path to modernizing legacy codebases and the migration to a “clean core”, a modern ERP system without hard-coded customizations.

Generative AI hub updates

By the end of the year, 2024, developers will be able to customize pre-trained AI models using a guided process, to create their own AI-driven applications, SAP said. They will also have the ability to integrate advanced AI capabilities into web applications, with new software development kit (SDK) support for ABAP, Java, and JavaScript. This toolkit will help them embed intelligent features like chatbots and content generators into sites.

Another new SDK, the ABAP AI SDK, will let developers access generative AI hub capabilities from within custom ABAP applications to allow them to add AI functions to those applications and extensions.

New LLMs

Finally, SAP is adding several new large language models (LLMs) to the generative AI hub by the end of this year, raising the number to more than 30. The additions include:

• Aleph Alpha Pharia-1
• Amazon Titan Image Generator
• IBM Granite
• Mistral Large 2
• OpenAI Dall-E 3