Introduced by SAP
When SAP ran a quiet inner experiment to gauge marketing consultant 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 may usually take a number of weeks.
4 groups had been advised the evaluation had been accomplished by junior interns recent out of faculty. They reviewed the fabric, discovered it spectacular, and rated the work about 95% correct.
The fifth staff was advised the exact same solutions had come from AI.
They rejected nearly every thing.
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 realized right here is that we have to be very cautious as we introduce AI — particularly in how we talk with senior consultants about its prospects and how one 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 turn out to be a revealing start line for SAP’s push towards the marketing consultant of 2030: a practitioner who’s deeply human, enabled by AI, and 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 usually are not 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 always: “AI will not be changing you. It’s a device for you. Human oversight is all the time required. However now, as a substitute of spending your time in search of documentation, you’re gaining important time and boosting the effectiveness and element of your solutions.”
The marketing consultant time-shift: from tech execution to enterprise perception
Traditionally, consultants spent about 80% of their time understanding technical programs — how processes run, how knowledge flows, how features execute. Prospects, in contrast, spend 80% of their time centered on their enterprise.
That mismatch is strictly the place Joule steps in.
“There’s a niche there — and the bridge is AI,” Vazquez says. “It flips the time equation, enabling consultants to take a position extra of their vitality in understanding the client’s business and enterprise targets. AI takes on the heavy technical carry, so consultants can give attention to driving the fitting enterprise outcomes.”
Bringing new consultants on top of things
AI can be remodeling how new hires be taught.
“We’re excited to see Joule performing 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 immediately’s AI copilots. A lot of the work depends upon immediate engineering — for example, instructing Joule to behave as a senior chief expertise architect specializing in finance and SAP S/4HANA 2023, then asking it to investigate enterprise necessities and ship the output as tables or PowerPoint slides.
As soon as they grasp how one can body prompts, consultants persistently 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 shortly new hires are adapting and studying with AI, and that momentum encourages them to maintain tempo and undertake the expertise themselves.
Waiting for the way forward for AI copilots
“We’re nonetheless within the child steps of AI — we’re toddlers,” Vazquez says. “Proper now, copilots rely upon immediate engineering to get good solutions. The higher you immediate, the higher the reply you get.”
However that represents solely the earliest part of what these programs will finally do. As copilots mature, they’ll transfer past responding to prompts and begin deciphering 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 instantly into agentic AI.
SAP’s depth of course of information is what makes that evolution potential. The corporate has mapped greater than 3,500 enterprise processes throughout industries — a repository Vazquez calls “a number of the Most worthy, rigorously examined processes developed within the final 50 years.” Each day, SAP programs help 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 are able to take an actual leap ahead,” he says, “equipping our consultants with agentic AI that may remedy advanced challenges and push us towards more and more autonomous programs.”
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