SAP SE and IBM have announced that IBM Watson technology will be embedded into SAP solutions. SAP will use IBM Watson capabilities to power its digital assistant in SAP Start, which provides a unified entry point for cloud solutions from SAP.

With SAP Start, users can search for, launch and interactively engage with apps provided in cloud solutions from SAP and SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

New AI capabilities in SAP Start will be designed to help users boost productivity with both natural language capabilities and predictive insights using IBM Watson AI solutions built on IBM’s trust and transparency and data privacy principles.

“This milestone collaboration with IBM aims to provide SAP customers a better user experience, faster decision-making and greater insights to help transform their business processes,” said Christian Klein, CEO and Member of the Executive Board of SAP SE.

New digital assistant capabilities in SAP Start will be extended across SAP solutions to help answer diverse questions for managers and employees. By automating and speeding up common tasks, the capabilities are designed to help unlock employee productivity to focus on more strategic work. 

SAP Start will allow customers to benefit from intelligence at the point of decision-making with the ability to use AI and machine learning to extract information from a variety of data sources and answer user questions across lines of business.

In addition to natively embedding IBM Watson AI capabilities into SAP solutions, SAP and IBM are collaborating on generative AI and large language models aimed to deliver consistent continuous learning and automation based on SAP’s critical application suite.