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When SAP ran a quiet inner experiment to gauge guide attitudes towards AI, the outcomes have been hanging. 5 groups have 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 may usually take a number of weeks.
4 groups have been instructed the evaluation had been accomplished by junior interns contemporary out of faculty. They reviewed the fabric, discovered it spectacular, and rated the work about 95% correct.
The fifth group was instructed the exact same solutions had come from AI.
They rejected virtually every part.
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 learned here is that we need to be very cautious as we introduce AI — especially in how we communicate with senior consultants about its possibilities and how to integrate it into their workflows,” says Guillermo B. Vazquez Mendez, chief architect, RI enterprise transformation and structure, SAP America Inc.
The experiment has since change into a revealing start line for SAP’s push towards the guide 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 shocking, Vazquez notes. Consultants with two or three a long time of expertise carry monumental institutional data — and an comprehensible diploma of warning.
However AI copilots like Joule for Consultants should not changing experience. They’re amplifying it.
“What Joule really does is make their very expensive time far more effective,” Vazquez says. “It removes the clerical work, so they can focus on turning out high-quality answers in a fraction of the time.”
He emphasizes this message consistently: “AI is not replacing you. It’s a tool for you. Human oversight is always required. But now, instead of spending your time looking for documentation, you’re gaining significant time and boosting the effectiveness and detail of your answers.”
The guide time-shift: from tech execution to enterprise perception
Traditionally, consultants spent about 80% of their time understanding technical methods — how processes run, how information 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 gap there — and the bridge is AI,” Vazquez says. “It flips the time equation, enabling consultants to invest more of their energy in understanding the customer’s industry and business goals. AI takes on the heavy technical lift, so consultants can focus on driving the right business outcomes.”
Bringing new consultants up to the mark
AI can also be reworking how new hires study.
“We’re excited to see Joule acting as a bridge between senior consultants, who are adapting more slowly, and interns and new consultants who are already technically savvy,” Vazquez says.
Junior consultants ramp up sooner as a result of Joule helps them function independently. Seniors, in the meantime, interact the place their perception issues most.
That is additionally the place many consultants study the basics of at present’s AI copilots. A lot of the work is determined by immediate engineering — as an illustration, 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 in a position to talk extra clearly with their extra skilled counterparts. They know what they don’t know and might 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 still in the baby steps of AI — we’re toddlers,” Vazquez says. “Right now, copilots depend on prompt engineering to get good answers. The better you prompt, the better the answer you get.”
However that represents solely the earliest section of what these methods will finally do. As copilots mature, they’ll transfer past responding to prompts and begin decoding complete 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 immediately into agentic AI.
SAP’s depth of course of data is what makes that evolution potential. The corporate has mapped greater than 3,500 enterprise processes throughout industries — a repository Vazquez calls “some of the most valuable, rigorously tested processes developed in the last 50 years.” Day-after-day, SAP methods assist roughly $7.3 trillion in international commerce, giving these rising AI brokers a wealthy basis to navigate and motive over.
“With that level of process insight and data, we can take a real leap forward,” he says, “equipping our consultants with agentic AI that can solve complex challenges and push us toward increasingly autonomous systems.”
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