Provided by SAP
When SAP conducted a quiet internal experiment to gauge consultants’ attitudes toward AI, the results were surprising. The five teams were asked to validate answers to more than 1,000 business requirements completed by Joule for Consultants, SAP’s AI co-pilot. This workload typically takes several weeks.
The four teams were told that the analyzes were completed by junior interns who had just graduated from school. They reviewed the material, found it impressive, and rated the work as approximately 95% accurate.
The fifth team was told that the AI had given them the exact same answer.
They rejected almost everything.
It was only when they were asked to verify each answer one by one that they realized that the AI was actually very accurate, revealing detailed insights that the consultants had initially ignored. What is the overall accuracy? Again, about 95%.
“The lesson learned here is that you need to be very careful when implementing AI, especially in how you communicate with senior consultants about its potential and how to integrate AI into your workflows,” said Guillermo B. Vázquez Mendez, chief architect, RI Business Transformation and Architecture, SAP Americas.
This experiment then became an obvious starting point for SAP’s efforts to become the consultant of 2030, a deeply human practitioner enabled by AI and unburdened by the technical drudgery of the past.
Overcoming AI skepticism
The resistance is not surprising, Vazquez points out. Consultants with 20 to 30 years of experience have a vast amount of organizational knowledge and naturally have a degree of prudence.
But AI co-pilots like Joule for Consultants don’t replace expertise. They’re amplifying it.
“What Juul is really doing is making a very expensive time more effective,” Vasquez says. “By eliminating administrative work, you can focus on getting high-quality answers in a fraction of the time.”
He constantly emphasizes this message. “AI isn’t going to replace you. It’s a tool for you. Human oversight will always be necessary. But now, instead of wasting time searching for documentation, you’ll gain significantly more time and increase the effectiveness and detail of your answers.”
Consultant Timeshift: From Technology Execution to Business Insights
Historically, consultants have spent about 80% of their time understanding technical systems: how processes run, how data flows, and how functions are performed. In contrast, customers spend 80% of their time focusing on their business.
This discrepancy is where Joule intervenes.
“There is a gap, and AI is the bridge to that,” Vazquez says. “The time equation is reversed, allowing consultants to invest more energy into understanding their clients’ industry and business goals. AI reduces the technical burden so consultants can focus on driving the right business outcomes.”
Keep new consultants up to date
AI is also changing the way new employees learn.
“We look forward to Juul serving as a bridge between senior consultants who are slow to adapt and interns and new consultants who are already tech-savvy,” says Vasquez.
Junior consultants progress faster because Joule helps them work independently. Seniors, on the other hand, are involved where their insight is most important.
This is also where many consultants learn the fundamentals of today’s AI co-pilots. Much of the work is about rapid engineering. For example, you might ask Joule to act as a senior chief technology architect specializing in finance and SAP S/4HANA 2023, analyze your business requirements, and provide the results as a table or PowerPoint slide.
Once consultants understand how to structure prompts, they can consistently get higher quality, more structured answers.
It also allows new architects to communicate more clearly with experienced architects. They know what they don’t know and can ask targeted questions, making mentoring much smoother. It created a real synergy, Vazquez added. Senior consultants say they’re seeing how quickly new hires are adapting to and learning about AI, which is motivating them to keep up and adopt the technology themselves.
Looking to the future of AI co-pilots
“We’re still in the baby stage of AI. We’re infants,” Vasquez says. “First officers now rely on rapid engineering to get the right answers. The more you ask the right questions, the better the answers you get.”
But this is just the early stages of what these systems will ultimately do. As the co-pilot matures, he or she begins to interpret entire business processes rather than just responding to prompts. This means understanding the sequence of steps, identifying where human intervention is required, and identifying where an AI agent can take over. This change leads directly to agent AI.
Deep knowledge of SAP processes enables its evolution. The company has mapped more than 3,500 business processes across industries. Vazquez calls the repository “some of the most valuable and rigorously tested processes developed over the past 50 years.” SAP systems support approximately $7.3 trillion in global commerce every day, providing a rich foundation for these emerging AI agents to navigate and reason.
“With this level of process insight and data, we can take a real leap forward. We can equip consultants with agent AI that can solve complex challenges and drive increasingly autonomous systems,” he says.
Sponsored articles are content created by companies that pay us to post or have a business relationship with VentureBeat, and are always clearly marked. For more information please contact us sales@venturebeat.com.
