SAP announces Databricks partnership to power AI with Business Data Cloud – News

Enterprise software giant SAP SE today debuted the Business Data Cloud, a new data solution that unifies all SAP data and third-party data throughout an organization to provide a foundation for insights and artificial intelligence applications.

The company also announced a partnership with enterprise data processing and AI company Databricks Inc. The collaboration natively embeds Databrick’s technology for data engineering, machine learning and AI workloads into SAP’s cloud solution.

Muhammad Alam, head of product engineering at SAP, said the solution brings with it a new product economy that allows businesses greater control over their information and allows them to apply it to organizations.

“When data is disconnected from the source application, you simply cannot have good reliable AI,” Alam said. Everything that happens within a business is interconnected and businesses spend millions of dollars attempting to harmonize it, and that’s what Business Data Cloud helps solve.

Within BDC customers gain access to data products. What are data products? They are semantically rich data that come from all SAP applications that are managed by the company out-of-the-box and designed for a specific industry use case so that they can be applied directly to maintain an original business context without requiring a costly business extraction process.

For example, if a chief financial officer wants to look at the impact of tariffs or a regional change in pricing on profitability, Business Data Cloud could integrate real-time external data such as consumer price indexes with financial data products such as general ledger accounts or cost centers and generate a financial snapshot.

“The BDC is a big deal because it evolves the notion of SAP data, and then it lets those AI use cases start consuming the data,” Irfan Khan, SAP’s president and chief product officer of data and analytics, told News in an interview.

Data within BDC will take advantage of zero-copy capability, Khan explained, which enables faster feature engineering and helps with the data-to-model pipeline by accelerating the iterative process of training and refining AI models. The solution handles the ongoing management and updates of data products, reducing the burden on information technology and data engineering teams for extraction, cleansing and curation.

“So, if I was to use sort of a gasoline kind of analogy here, you can end up with regular gas, and maybe mid-range gas, and then you have high-octane premium gas,” Khan said. “So, I would argue, SAP data is definitely premium, high-octane gas.”

Business Data Cloud will incorporate SAP Datasphere. The platform was launched in 2023 and was designed as the next-generation of the older SAP Data Warehouse Cloud. Datasphere acts as a platform-as-a-service fabric to connect, harmonize and distribute SAP and non-SAP data sources for customer applications, something that BDC does at its core. Khan said that current Datasphere customers will be migrated effortlessly and it will not change their operations.

Business users can take this managed data from SAP in combination with Databricks into their applications directly and it will also be used to supercharge Joule, SAP’s generative AI copilot.

As part of today’s announcement, SAP unveiled a series of ready-to-use Joule agents. These AI agents can take action, make decisions and use tools with little or no human oversight across finance, sales and more industries across the SAP Business Suite. For example, in finance, multiple agents can work together to process claims faster and improve business cash flow. Multiple Jules sales agents can operate in tandem to resolve disputes and answer simple customer inquiries.

For use cases that out-of-the-box AI agents do not currently handle, SAP announced a new agent builder. With the builder capability, customers can tailor their own AI agents using the most relevant data and business context to handle guided workflows.

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