AI is changing our daily lives, and making extraordinary complex tasks, particularly from a data searching and basic task perspective, but it’s also changing the enterprise software space and how enterprises data can be used and refined to provide meaningful business insights.
According to Stef de Mulder of SAP, you need “on the fly” access to insights via seamless data streamlining. “Our vision is the only way to create value in a business is by connecting applications, data, and AI, withthe data available with the right context” he stated at the SAP business innovation summit in Johannesburg today. “That means that AI systems will be able to understand what the data is doing, how it’s implemented”.”That is why we believe that starting from the application phase, we explore the data with the right context, with the right security, with the right governance” quips Mulder.
Businesses using Enterprise systems today have various applications that extract data, however Mulder points out that the moment you extract your data, you lose the context connection. “You have the highways, the timings, the massive data, the security, you lose that context” he states.
Some of the challenges highlighted at the event today are: limited reach, as well as business data positioned in separate silos. The solution according to SAP is – “Data as as Service” – DaaS. This adds data products to business logic and intelligent applications that will analyse and prepare automated reports or dashboards.
Flywheel of Data Concept
Mulder presented the concept of a continuous loop of generating data, then adding AI to ultimately, generate even more data, and using that to convey the information within a contextual framework. He introduced the SAP concept of a Business Data Cloud that works as follows: The system retrieves various data from various data points, and then will apply business logic, to bring you intelligent applications. this then provides you your data as a service. SAP systems does the extraction of the data, ensuring data points are available to the business, with the right business context.
SAP has partnered with multiple data platform providers, and so is data agnostic, enabling data from almost any platform to be incorporated into its Business Data Cloud platform that then becomes the channel for their AI driven software able to extract and analyse within a wider context.
This system according to Mulder is saving up to 67% in time for some of their European clients utilising the Business Data Cloud. “It’s about creating a principle that BDC is actually the one source of quality security data, curated data with the right properties, and making that available to all other technologies” comments Mulder.
“Make sure you get the right answers. You need the right answers. That’s why the context gap is there between AI and data.Without context, there is no AI” Concludes Mulder.
