Germany's SAP Expands Partnerships With Big Tech in AI Push

By Mauro Orru

SAP is expanding its artificial-intelligence partnerships with U.S. technology giants as the German business-software company doubles down on efforts to cash in on the technology.

The group behind the Concur travel and expense management platform said it would integrate Meta Platforms' latest large language model to generate scripts, allowing users of its generative AI hub to create dashboards based on conversational output.

Meta released Llama 3, the latest version of its publicly available large language model, in April. The social-media company announced two initial versions of the model, including an 8 billion parameter model and another with 70 billion parameters. Parameters measure a model's size and capabilities.

Walter Sun, senior vice president and global head of AI at SAP, said in a blog post that Meta's Llama 3 model would be available in its generative AI hub by the end of June, singling out the 70 billion parameters variant as the largest open-source model on its generative AI hub.

SAP is cementing new AI partnerships and expanding existing ones as it seeks to gain an edge over rivals. Aside from Meta, the company is also partnering with Mistral AI to integrate new large language models from the French startup.

Meanwhile, the group is also working with Microsoft to integrate SAP's generative AI copilot, Joule, with Microsoft Copilot. Philipp Herzig, chief artificial intelligence officer at SAP, said in a blog post that users would be able to book flights using Concur and have their calendars in Microsoft Outlook blocked by Joule.

SAP also counts partnerships with the likes of Amazon.com's cloud-computing arm, Alphabet's Google Cloud and Nvidia.

Advancements in generative AI--illustrated by the popularity of OpenAI's ChatGPT--sparked a wave of investments from tech companies jockeying for position in a rapidly evolving market that looks set to revolutionize the future of business and human labor.

SAP last year made investments in three generative AI companies--Aleph Alpha, Anthropic and Cohere--and poached Sun from Microsoft as its global head of artificial intelligence.

In January, the group outlined a restructuring program that will affect some 8,000 jobs, with most of those cuts expected to be covered by voluntary leave programs and internal reskilling, when workers are trained to fill other roles within the group.

Write to Mauro Orru at mauro.orru@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 04, 2024 12:34 ET (16:34 GMT)

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