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SAP UX Latest 2024 Innovations in Public Cloud: Joule, GenAI and More

ThomasReiss
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
‎2024 Jul 25 11:12 AM
9,458

We are taking SAP’s user experience to the next level by incorporating new AI design patterns into our products. These last six months our public cloud products have been leading the way, so let us have a look at concrete examples of how users can get their jobs done more easily thanks to these patterns for Joule and Generative AI (GenAI) in SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP Ariba, SAP Customer Experience and SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408. In addition to AI patterns, our product teams have also invested in specific user experience improvements. Finally, our technology teams have made it easier to build UIs, leveraging GenAI built into SAP Business AI.

We are accelerating our use of AI in our user experience, to make work easier for users – so much so that you might even feel overwhelmed by all the new announcements and features across our portfolio! However, there are some fundamental patterns which we have identified and which our designers have baked into our SAP Design System. Understanding these patterns will help you understand how we are incorporating AI into our user experience. It will make it easier for you to put the many announcements of new AI-enabled features into context.

In this post, we’ll look at:

  • The AI design patterns, with concrete examples in our products.
  • User experience improvements in selected products.
  • UI technology innovations.

These are the AI design patterns we’ll be looking at, each with their own section:

  • Joule UX innovations, with a focus on the new informational pattern for customer documents provided by SAP SuccessFactors.
  • Triggering GenAI actions, such as
    • Providing a summary of a given business object or context.
    • Creating proposals, such as performance goals in SuccessFactors, or for a category segmentation in SAP Ariba.
    • GenAI prompts within application UIs – for using natural language directly within the application.
    • Guided AI Prompts – for example for writing assistants, so that users don’t have to worry about what prompt text to enter to get the desired result.

We expect these patterns to be used broadly across the SAP portfolio in the future; the examples below are from products which have adopted them first.

Transformational as AI is for the user experience, it is only a part of the overall interaction a user has with an application. Hence, in addition to introducing AI into our UI, we are continuing to work on ensuring that we provide a good overall user experience, by improving existing applications and by building new ones. In this post, I’ll give you a brief overview of some of the major innovations of the last six months, and provide pointers where you can find out more, in the sections:

  • User Experience Improvements in Selected Products
    • SAP SuccessFactors
    • SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408

The same goes for our UI technology, where we are embedding AI to make it easier to build applications with great UX – I’ll give you a brief overview along with pointers to more details, in the sections:

  • UI Technology Innovations
    • AI-enabled UI Development
    • Further UI Technology Highlights

Joule User Experience Innovations

Joule is your AI-enabled copilot for working with SAP, allowing you to use natural language to gain insights and achieve results. Today, it is generally available for SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Customer Experience and SAP Build Code. It is also available to early adopters of SAP Start and SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. The navigational pattern (see below) is already available for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition. 

First, let me recap the main interaction patterns provided by Joule, before introducing a new capability available today with SAP SuccessFactors.

Joule Interaction Patterns

Joule has these three interaction patterns, examples of which you can see in Figure 1.

Informational Pattern: allows you to query documentation with natural language, typically with a “How do I…” question. Joule provides concise summaries of content from documents, such as SAP documentation in the Help Portal, along with three links to the most relevant sections of the documents.

Navigational Pattern: Joule recommends relevant applications and facilitates seamless navigation to these applications – typically in response to a “Where can I…” question.

Transactional Pattern: Joule offers insightful information about business objects. It also allows you to make updates to business data directly within Joule, eliminating the necessity of opening the corresponding application.

Figure 1: Examples of each of the three interaction patterns for Joule: informational, navigational, and transactional, from SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition (for early adopters). ALT Text: Three images of Joule are shown. On the left, the informational pattern shows that the user has typed “Can I configure a workflow for my purchase requisitions”. Below that, the eight-line written answer is shown, followed by a “Search results” selector and three top search results. In the middle, the navigational pattern, the user has typed “Where can I execute mass changes on my purchase requisition?”, below that, the reply from Joule “Here’s what I’ve found” is followed by a card containing three lines, each with an application name and an “Open” button. On the right the transactional pattern, the user has typed “Show Purchase Requisitions”, Joule responded with “Sure, here is what I found” and a card containing three lines, each with a PR number followed by an “Open” button.Figure 1: Examples of each of the three interaction patterns for Joule: informational, navigational, and transactional, from SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition (for early adopters). ALT Text: Three images of Joule are shown. On the left, the informational pattern shows that the user has typed “Can I configure a workflow for my purchase requisitions”. Below that, the eight-line written answer is shown, followed by a “Search results” selector and three top search results. In the middle, the navigational pattern, the user has typed “Where can I execute mass changes on my purchase requisition?”, below that, the reply from Joule “Here’s what I’ve found” is followed by a card containing three lines, each with an application name and an “Open” button. On the right the transactional pattern, the user has typed “Show Purchase Requisitions”, Joule responded with “Sure, here is what I found” and a card containing three lines, each with a PR number followed by an “Open” button.

New: Informational Pattern for Customer Documents

We have now extended the informational pattern to allow customers of SAP SuccessFactors to upload company policy documents which can be queried via Joule. This means that users can use natural language to ask a question, such as “What’s the expense limit for business meals in Germany?”, and Joule will provide a concise summary from the customer policy document(s). Not only that: Joule will also provide links to the relevant documents. Think about how much time you can save that way! Figure 2 shows an example, and Video 1 shows an example from 0:57 to 1:30.

Figure 2: Example of a user using Joule to query a customer expense policy document. ALT Text: The image shows the top part of the SuccessFactors home page with Joule as an overlay on the right. The user has typed in to the Joule chat “Can I use my private car for my business trip?”. Below that, Joule’s nine-line response is shown, followed by a link to the source document.Figure 2: Example of a user using Joule to query a customer expense policy document. ALT Text: The image shows the top part of the SuccessFactors home page with Joule as an overlay on the right. The user has typed in to the Joule chat “Can I use my private car for my business trip?”. Below that, Joule’s nine-line response is shown, followed by a link to the source document.

Technically, the customer documents that have been uploaded are grounded into the underlying AI large language model, which means that we can use the power of generative AI to extract information from these documents without the risk of hallucinations. 

You can find out more about this new Joule use case supported by SAP SuccessFactors, along with a large number of new transactional use cases in the What’s New Viewer for 1H2024:

Have a Look at How Joule Energizes You at Work

Joule, your copilot for working with SAP, is intended to give users a natural language based single entry point (in the web or on mobile) for all their applications and business data – complementing the UI-based single entry point in the web provided by SAP Start, and the UI-based mobile entry point provided by SAP Mobile Start.

As such, Joule will also support many of the AI interaction patterns I listed in the introduction above. Indeed, already today you can see these patterns in action in Video 1 below:

  • Summary of a business object (in this case a customer account summary, combining data from SAP Sales Cloud and SAP S/4HANA Cloud).
  • Summary of customer requirements from an email message.
  • Transactional pattern: interacting with SAP Intelligent Product Recommendation, to get a best-fit product for the customer request.

Informational pattern for customer documents: a query to the company expense policy about how much employees can spend on dinner for entertaining a customer

Video 1: Joule in action for SAP Start, SAP Customer Experience and SAP SuccessFactors informational pattern for customer documents.Video 1: Joule in action for SAP Start, SAP Customer Experience and SAP SuccessFactors informational...

Joule also supports developers building new applications and their UIs, you can see an example of this towards the end of the blog post.

Watch these videos to see more examples of Joule in action for SAP Customer Experience (CX) and SAP S/4HANA Cloud:

Outlook

Here are some forward-looking statements about what we plan to deliver in the near future. As always, these are subject to change, but of course we hope to deliver as planned.

Towards the end of Q3/2024, we plan to make Joule generally available in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, with the informational pattern available everywhere, and the other two patterns available for selected business areas.

Later this year, SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain and SAP Ariba Category Management plan to provide Joule integration.

Just as we have extended the informational pattern to support customer documents for SAP SuccessFactors, so we plan to provide this capability also for customer documents relevant to other products.

A major step forward planned for later this year is support for analytics in the transactional pattern, so that users can query analytics and get responses as charts. We also plan to incorporate GenAI into the major workflows of SAP Analytics Cloud – read more about this in:

So far Joule is only available in English. Later this year we plan to support further languages, including French, German, Spanish and Portuguese.

For more details, have a look at the road map for Joule in the SAP Road Map Explorer:

Triggering Generative AI Actions in the Application UI

A simple yet powerful way of helping users achieve better outcomes is to embed a generative AI action within an application UI, so that the system can for example generate a proposal based on initial data entered into the UI or already in the system. We can distinguish between the following kinds of actions:

  • Creating a written summary of existing business data, be it from an incoming email or data in the system, such as a customer account, a sales order or financial data.
  • Creating a proposal for new or updated business data or business objects, such as a performance goal for an employee, or a procurement category segmentation.

Creating a Summary of Business Data

I’d like to show you an example from SAP Customer Experience (CX) for creating an account summary, and two examples available now for Beta testing with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition: summarization of object pages, and financial business insights.

SAP Customer Experience Example

SAP Customer Experience offers users various AI capabilities for working more effectively, one of these being summarizing business data, for example summarizing an incoming email for SAP Service Cloud. This capability is also embedded in Joule. You can see examples of this, and more, in this video (the summaries are from 0:25 to 0:50):

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition Examples

The following two examples are currently available as a Beta release.

Summarizing Object Pages

For all object pages which have been built with SAP Fiori elements, users can ask the system to summarize the business object. For example, if a manager sends an email asking for a summary of a sales order, the internal sales representative can use this feature to create a written summary, edit it as needed, and send it to their manager, saving a lot of time. Figure 3 shows what this looks like; you can also see it in action with this video:

Figure 3: Smart summarization of a sales order in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, available as a Beta release. ALT Text: the image shows a popover above a sales order UI. The popover contains text with a title “Order Summary” and sections “Introduction”, “Date and Location” and “Key Highlights”. The bottom right of the screen has a “Copy All” button.Figure 3: Smart summarization of a sales order in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, available as a Beta release. ALT Text: the image shows a popover above a sales order UI. The popover contains text with a title “Order Summary” and sections “Introduction”, “Date and Location” and “Key Highlights”. The bottom right of the screen has a “Copy All” button.

AI-Assisted Financial Business Insights

Interpreting financial data can be challenging, and explaining them in an easy-to-understand way even more so. Hence, we provide AI-Assisted Financial Business Insights, which make this task much easier. Figure 4 shows an example of how the system will provide a summary report of the financial data. You can see it in action here:

Figure 4: Summarizing financial reporting data in easy-to-understand language as provided by  SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, available as a Beta release. ALT Text: the image shows a table on the left with 27 lines and 5 columns of cost center information, and on the right a comprehensive summary with a heading and five paragraphs. The screenshot is overlaid top left by an explanation box with the text “Increase financial reporting efficiency with quick actions supported by generative AI”, and at the bottom with an explanation box with the text “the company seems to have increased costs in 2024 compared to 2023”.Figure 4: Summarizing financial reporting data in easy-to-understand language as provided by  SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, available as a Beta release. ALT Text: the image shows a table on the left with 27 lines and 5 columns of cost center information, and on the right a comprehensive summary with a heading and five paragraphs. The screenshot is overlaid top left by an explanation box with the text “Increase financial reporting efficiency with quick actions supported by generative AI”, and at the bottom with an explanation box with the text “the company seems to have increased costs in 2024 compared to 2023”.

Generating proposals for business data

Let me show two examples for this pattern available today, from SAP Success Factors and from SAP Ariba. Note that SAP Customer Experience also offers GenAI support for creating business data, as already mentioned in the previous section.

SAP SuccessFactors Example

SAP SuccessFactors now supports managers who need to formulate performance goals, by providing a “Generate” with AI action. Managers can provide a brief description of the goal, and SAP SuccessFactors not only generates a longer description, it also makes proposals for milestones, with a suitable task description along with start and end dates. Of course, goals need to be well thought out by managers; nevertheless, having an initial starting point, especially with a break-down of potential goals on a timeline, can be very helpful, especially for less experienced managers. Figure 5 shows an example which showcases our AI button with the AI icon (to the left of the “Generate” text in the button).

Figure 5: Example from SAP SuccessFactors of an AI action for triggering generative AI to help managers formulate performance goals, along with suitable milestones. ALT Text: an animation showing how a user can enter the text “AI strategy for our production plant by Q4” and then click on the “Generate” button, which features the AI icon on the left. The result is a form with a goal description and metrics, followed by a table with proposed milestones and their start and end dates.Figure 5: Example from SAP SuccessFactors of an AI action for triggering generative AI to help managers formulate performance goals, along with suitable milestones. ALT Text: an animation showing how a user can enter the text “AI strategy for our production plant by Q4” and then click on the “Generate” button, which features the AI icon on the left. The result is a form with a goal description and metrics, followed by a table with proposed milestones and their start and end dates.

SAP Ariba Example

SAP Ariba Category Management also provides an additional AI action for creating a procurement category segmentation from scratch. As in the previous example, a Generate button with the AI icon is used, see Figure 6.

Figure 6: Example from SAP Ariba Category Management of an AI action for triggering generative AI to help create a category segmentation. ALT Text: an animation which starts with a screen with an illustration and text “No Segmentation to Display”. The user clicks on a button which features the AI icon before the text “Generate”, and the result is a proposed category segmentation chart on the left with a text summary on the right.Figure 6: Example from SAP Ariba Category Management of an AI action for triggering generative AI to help create a category segmentation. ALT Text: an animation which starts with a screen with an illustration and text “No Segmentation to Display”. The user clicks on a button which features the AI icon before the text “Generate”, and the result is a proposed category segmentation chart on the left with a text summary on the right.

Generative AI Prompt within Application UI

We can go a step further than the simple AI action by letting users use natural language to interact directly with the application UI. We do this by enabling them to enter a prompt directly in the UI.

Since most users will not be familiar with formulating powerful GenAI prompts (prompt engineering), we use this simple input field in cases where it is obvious to the user what kind of input is expected.

The first example I’d like to share is the powerful “Just ask” feature now generally available with SAP Analytics Cloud. You can use natural language to create a query, and SAP Analytics Cloud uses AI to interpret the text as well as to decide on the most appropriate chart to use to visualize the result. Figure 7 shows an example.

Figure 7: “Just ask” in SAP Analytics Cloud. ALT Text: the user has entered “gross margin product”, and the appropriate chart representation (a horizontal bar chart) has been used to display the gross margin per product on the left. On the right you see that the system gives suggestions for suitable texts in buttons, which when clicked enter the text displayed in the button. The first such proposal shown is “Gross Margin per Category”. There is also a “Save question” section with a button with the text “gross margin product”.Figure 7: “Just ask” in SAP Analytics Cloud. ALT Text: the user has entered “gross margin product”, and the appropriate chart representation (a horizontal bar chart) has been used to display the gross margin per product on the left. On the right you see that the system gives suggestions for suitable texts in buttons, which when clicked enter the text displayed in the button. The first such proposal shown is “Gross Margin per Category”. There is also a “Save question” section with a button with the text “gross margin product”.

The next example is now available as a Beta in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, allowing users to use natural language to filter lists, as an alternative to using the individual filter fields in the filter bar. The AI icon in the “Go” button indicates to users that AI is behind this functionality. Figure 8 shows an example for sales orders.

Figure 8: Using natural language to filter a list of sales orders in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition (available as a Beta). The user has entered the text “Show me all open sales orders for December 2023”, the list only shows entries matching this query. ALT Text: the image shows a list report. At the top there is a toggle for the filter mode, with the options “Classic” and “SAP Business AI”. Below that, a disclaimer text, that generated content may not always be accurate. Below that, the text field for the query, to its right a button which features the AI icon before the text “Go”. Below that, the result list with 11 lines and 8 columns.Figure 8: Using natural language to filter a list of sales orders in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition (available as a Beta). The user has entered the text “Show me all open sales orders for December 2023”, the list only shows entries matching this query. ALT Text: the image shows a list report. At the top there is a toggle for the filter mode, with the options “Classic” and “SAP Business AI”. Below that, a disclaimer text, that generated content may not always be accurate. Below that, the text field for the query, to its right a button which features the AI icon before the text “Go”. Below that, the result list with 11 lines and 8 columns.
Technically, this feature is provided by applications built with SAP Fiori elements using OData V4. You can watch an example here:

Guided AI Prompts

Creating good text proposals with Generative AI requires good prompts – something which most users of business systems have no or little expertise in. Hence, we have come up with guided AI prompts, which give users a UI element that allows them to tweak the kind of outcome they want, so that users don’t have to worry about what prompt text to enter to get the desired result.

SAP Customer Experience Example

Figure 9 shows how SAP Customer Experience enables service and support users to easily create response emails, in this case with sliders to influence the style, tone and length. As you can see, users don’t need to know exactly what kind of generative AI prompt text is needed, they can simply adjust the sliders to get the desired outcome – which they can of course further edit if needed.

Figure 9: Guided AI Prompt from SAP Customer Experience, showing the sliders for choosing the style, tone and length of the email on the left and a possible generated draft email text on the right. ALT Text: the slider and draft mail are visualized as a popover. Below the sliders there is a button which features the AI icon before the text “Generate Draft”. The popover has a language selector top right, with English now chosen, and “Apply” and “Cancel” buttons bottom right.Figure 9: Guided AI Prompt from SAP Customer Experience, showing the sliders for choosing the style, tone and length of the email on the left and a possible generated draft email text on the right. ALT Text: the slider and draft mail are visualized as a popover. Below the sliders there is a button which features the AI icon before the text “Generate Draft”. The popover has a language selector top right, with English now chosen, and “Apply” and “Cancel” buttons bottom right.

SAP SuccessFactors Writing Assistant

Managers often need to write text, be it formulating goals or giving feedback – but not everyone is a gifted writer! SAP SuccessFactors has found a novel way for generative AI to assist users in their writing. Figure 10 shows the approach, with an example where a manager is giving feedback to an employee. The “Give feedback” UI already provides good usability, by helping the manager formulate the main aspects (what went well?, what could I improve on?, any additional comments).

The new Writing Assistant takes this to the next level: by marking the text, a context menu appears, as you can see on the left in Figure 10; clicking on the AI icon brings the drop-down menu shown in the middle, where the manager can choose from various options to adapt the text with generative AI. On the right you see how the Writing Assistant shows you the original text and the suggested new text – in this case improving the original text, in particular by replacing “…they can be difficult” with “…even though they can sometimes be challenging”.

Figure 10: Guided AI Prompt from SAP SuccessFactors, available to users via the Writing Assistant. ALT Text: On the left, the “Give Feedback” popover is shown, for giving feedback to employee Faith Marshall. The “What went well?” field has the text “Thank you for coordinating with our local employees, they can be difficult”. This text has been marked by the user, leading to the context menu being shown on the left with the AI icon. Clicking on it brings the drop-down menu shown in the middle, with “Enhance Writing”, “Change Tone”, “Make Shorter”, “Make Longer, “Create Bulleted List”, “Make Feedback Actionable”. “Change Tone” has sub-options “Professional”, “Personable”, “Constructive”). On the right, the outcome of selecting “Enhance Writing”: the text has been enhanced to “Thank you for effectively coordinating with our local employees, even though they can sometimes be challenging”, with options to “Replace selection”, “Try again” or “Discard.Figure 10: Guided AI Prompt from SAP SuccessFactors, available to users via the Writing Assistant. ALT Text: On the left, the “Give Feedback” popover is shown, for giving feedback to employee Faith Marshall. The “What went well?” field has the text “Thank you for coordinating with our local employees, they can be difficult”. This text has been marked by the user, leading to the context menu being shown on the left with the AI icon. Clicking on it brings the drop-down menu shown in the middle, with “Enhance Writing”, “Change Tone”, “Make Shorter”, “Make Longer, “Create Bulleted List”, “Make Feedback Actionable”. “Change Tone” has sub-options “Professional”, “Personable”, “Constructive”). On the right, the outcome of selecting “Enhance Writing”: the text has been enhanced to “Thank you for effectively coordinating with our local employees, even though they can sometimes be challenging”, with options to “Replace selection”, “Try again” or “Discard.

User Experience Improvements in Selected Products

This section gives updates on our Web Entry Point, SAP SuccessFactors, and SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. I'll keep this section fairly short, and mainly point you to sources where you can find the details.

Web Entry Point: SAP Start, SAP Build Work Zone, SAP Task Center

SAP Start is now integrated with SAP Fieldglass, which provides two insight cards. Also, SAP SuccessFactors has provided three additional insight cards for SAP Start – read more here:

The SAP Task Center now provides APIs for integrating tasks from 3rd-party products. Read more about it here:

SAP Build Work Zone, advanced edition also has a number of enhancements:

SAP SuccessFactors

The 1H2024 release comes with a large number of UX innovations across the whole portfolio. To get the complete picture, have a look at these two blog posts:

Here, I would like to highlight the new design for the organizational chart, along with the new user experience for the people profile, with a brand new public view of your profile (public within your company) consisting of Profile Preview and Spotlight, along with more intuitive user interactions.

Figure 11: The new org chart in SAP SuccessFactors. ALT Text: The image shows an org chart, with each employee summarized in a box with their image on the left and their name and job role on the right. The image has a manager “Christine Dolan” at the top, below which another manager “Charles Braun” is shown, with his direct and indirect reports shown underneath: direct reports linked with and surrounded by a solid line, dotted-line ones linked with and surrounded by a dotted line.Figure 11: The new org chart in SAP SuccessFactors. ALT Text: The image shows an org chart, with each employee summarized in a box with their image on the left and their name and job role on the right. The image has a manager “Christine Dolan” at the top, below which another manager “Charles Braun” is shown, with his direct and indirect reports shown underneath: direct reports linked with and surrounded by a solid line, dotted-line ones linked with and surrounded by a dotted line.

Employees can build and represent their personal brand by showcasing skills and competencies, mentoring and target roles, and other relevant information sourced from SAP SuccessFactors solutions.

Colleagues who look at the org chart can get a quick preview of a user’s profile with the Profile Preview, shown in Figure 12, and get more information using the Spotlight, shown in Figure 13.

Figure 12: SAP SuccessFactors "Profile Preview", shown on the right. ALT Text: The image shows the preview as a popover on the right of the screen, with a photo of Aanya Singh and a “Show Spotlight” button next to it along with a button for opening the Org Chart. Below that, her role and organization are shown, along with some text she provided about herself, a photo, name and organization of her direct manager, and a link to “All Actions”.Figure 12: SAP SuccessFactors "Profile Preview", shown on the right. ALT Text: The image shows the preview as a popover on the right of the screen, with a photo of Aanya Singh and a “Show Spotlight” button next to it along with a button for opening the Org Chart. Below that, her role and organization are shown, along with some text she provided about herself, a photo, name and organization of her direct manager, and a link to “All Actions”.

Figure 13: SAP SuccessFactors "Spotlight". ALT Text: the image shows the Profile Preview of Aanya Singh on the left, but with the button “Hide Spotlight” instead of “Show Spotlight”. On the right, the rest of the screen shows her skills, competencies, who she is mentoring, her organization, an about me video, upcoming absence, work experience, reporting line, target roles and badges for good performance.Figure 13: SAP SuccessFactors "Spotlight". ALT Text: the image shows the Profile Preview of Aanya Singh on the left, but with the button “Hide Spotlight” instead of “Show Spotlight”. On the right, the rest of the screen shows her skills, competencies, who she is mentoring, her organization, an about me video, upcoming absence, work experience, reporting line, target roles and badges for good performance.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408

The latest release of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition comes with a large number of new AI-enabled user experience enhancements, such as the smart summarization and easy filter, which I explained earlier. To get an overview of all of these, read this summary, or watch Arpan Shah, Head of Product Management for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, introduce them all at this year’s SAP Sapphire conference:

As I mentioned in the introduction, AI is only a part of the overall interaction a user has with an application. I’d like to highlight these new innovations in the user experience for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition:

  • Spaces and Pages replace the classical SAP Fiori launchpad group-based visualization, so all customers are automatically enabled to use My Home.
  • My Home: To-Dos task cards show details, and AI makes suggestions for a users’ favorites (see Figure 14 below).
  • Collaborative ERP: further Microsoft integration with Adaptive card-based Loop components and integration with Microsoft Copilot as a Beta release – see below for more information.
  • Change Management: we are introducing a toggle to allow users to switch from the existing version of an app to a new version, starting with selected apps.

My Home

The To-Dos task cards offer action buttons, for example to approve or reject items. Often, this requires some key information about the item, for example the name of the product and the value for a purchase requisition. These details are now visualized directly in the task cards, as you can see in Figure 14.

Another useful new feature is AI recommendations for applications: as you can see in Figure 14 in the Apps section of My Home, a new tab has been introduced which uses AI to create a list of applications which are recommended to the user to add to their Favorites.

Figure 14: New features of My Home in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition: the To-Dos task cards show details, and AI makes recommendations for applications which are likely to be relevant to the user. ALT Text: the image shows three To-Do cards at the top, each with header text “Approve Purchase Requisition” followed by the number, below that the name of the requestor, item description, net value, requisition date and requestor. Each card has an “Approve” and “Reject” button. Below that, the Apps section has a new tab “Recommended” with an information banner below it explaining that “Here you can see applications that are recommended to you by SAP Business AI. You can choose to disable this tab using the settings”. Below that, two rows of five apps with their icons are shown. The bottom of the image shows parts of the News (on the left) and Pages (on the right) sections.Figure 14: New features of My Home in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition: the To-Dos task cards show details, and AI makes recommendations for applications which are likely to be relevant to the user. ALT Text: the image shows three To-Do cards at the top, each with header text “Approve Purchase Requisition” followed by the number, below that the name of the requestor, item description, net value, requisition date and requestor. Each card has an “Approve” and “Reject” button. Below that, the Apps section has a new tab “Recommended” with an information banner below it explaining that “Here you can see applications that are recommended to you by SAP Business AI. You can choose to disable this tab using the settings”. Below that, two rows of five apps with their icons are shown. The bottom of the image shows parts of the News (on the left) and Pages (on the right) sections.

As well as the above, My Home now provides:

  • To-Dos now also shows custom Situations, created using the extended Situation Handling framework, in addition to the standard situations delivered by SAP.
  • Intelligent generation of pre-delivered cards for new cloud customers.
  • Drag & drop is now enabled in the insights section, so you can directly rearrange your tiles and cards.
  • Information about deprecated apps.

Collaboration with Microsoft Copilot and Microsoft Loop Components

We already enable users to collaborate via Microsoft Teams, embedding applications in chats or as tabs in Teams channels. We are taking this to the next level, available for Beta testing with the 2408 release, by:

  • Informing users about to-dos via notifications in Microsoft Teams;
  • Enabling embedding of interactive cards with information and actions from SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition directly into Microsoft Teams, Outlook and Copilot. The data and actions are only shown to users with the necessary authorizations in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. Technically this is done via adaptive card-based Loop component; Figures 16 and 17 show examples.
  • Even more powerful: we have started integrating Microsoft Copilot with Joule, combining enterprise data residing in SAP with contextual knowledge from Microsoft 365, including Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Word, and more, helping to deliver richer insights for better decision-making.

Figures 15 and 16 show an example of integration with Microsoft Copilot and Microsoft Outlook. Figure 15 shows the response to Alice’s request to Copilot for details of a sales order, where you can see the written summary along with the adaptive card containing details, links and action buttons. Users can easily copy these adaptive cards into an Outlook e-mail or a Teams chat, using the copy button shown in Figure 15.

Figure 16 shows what it looks like if you receive an email containing an adaptive card – the example shows Frank’s inbox, with the e-mail that Alice sent him by copying the adaptive card shown in Figure 15. Frank can see the card with the details, links and action buttons.

To see it in action, watch this:

Figure 15: An example of how a user (Alice) can use Microsoft Copilot to interact with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. The image shows a summary of a sales order, with a card containing information about the sales order, including the action button “Remove Billing Block”.Figure 15: An example of how a user (Alice) can use Microsoft Copilot to interact with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. The image shows a summary of a sales order, with a card containing information about the sales order, including the action button “Remove Billing Block”.

Figure 16: An example of an adaptive card embedded in an Outlook email. The user Frank received an email from Alice requesting that he remove the billing block. ALT Text: the email contains text “Hey Frank, can you please help to get this sales order processed asap. Please remove the block!”, followed by a long URL to access the sales order, and the adaptive card with the heading “SAP S/4HANA Cloud”, the sales order number as a hyperlink, sales order details and two action buttons at the bottom “Set Billing Block” and “Remove Billing Block”.Figure 16: An example of an adaptive card embedded in an Outlook email. The user Frank received an email from Alice requesting that he remove the billing block. ALT Text: the email contains text “Hey Frank, can you please help to get this sales order processed asap. Please remove the block!”, followed by a long URL to access the sales order, and the adaptive card with the heading “SAP S/4HANA Cloud”, the sales order number as a hyperlink, sales order details and two action buttons at the bottom “Set Billing Block” and “Remove Billing Block”.

If you are interested in trying this out via the Beta testing program, you can register here.

 

UI Technology Innovations

Before showing you the latest innovations, I would like to introduce the new SAP Application Extension Methodology, and in particular the Extension Architecture Guide, which is for enterprise architects and solution architects that are already familiar with SAP's extensibility concepts and are seeking comprehensive decision-making guidance with an emphasis on the SAP Business Technology Platform. The section Presentation Tier Guidance summarizes SAP’s guidance for the extension task "create custom user interface (UI)", which addresses the need to develop a new custom UI, tailored to meet specific business requirements. 

This year, we have invested heavily in supporting developer extensibility for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. Learn more about it here:

AI-enabled UI Development

SAP Build Code brings AI-enablement for application developers on SAP Business Technology Platform, giving you:

  • Guided development to quickly build SAP Fiori apps: web, mobile and full-stack.
  • Built-in guidance and SAP best practices for developers to create enterprise-grade applications.
  • Visual tools and a programming language of your choice: JavaScript, TypeScript, Java and more.

With generative AI in SAP Build Code, you get the following:

  • Joule auto-generates app logic and data models.
  • Automated unit test coverage.
  • Contextual application logic code generation based on prompts.
  • Automatic sample data generation.

SAP Fiori tools go even further, allowing you to describe the list report and object page application you would like to create, and then automatically generating the data model , CDS views, OData services as well as the SAP Fiori elements UI. Figure 17 shows how you can use natural language to describe the application you want to build, in this case taking the example available in the documentation and copying it into Joule. Figure 18 shows the outcome: the data and code assets visualized in SAP Build Code as well as the resulting application UI list report and object page. Read more about this, and see it in action, in this blog post:

Figure 17: Using Joule with SAP Fiori tools to describe the SAP Fiori elements application you want to create, in this case taking the example text from the documentation. ALT Text: the image contains three screenshots. On the left the documentation, in the middle Joule with the initial lines of the documentation text entered, on the right Joule with the final lines of the documentation entered, where the field names are listed in the order they should appear in the list report.Figure 17: Using Joule with SAP Fiori tools to describe the SAP Fiori elements application you want to create, in this case taking the example text from the documentation. ALT Text: the image contains three screenshots. On the left the documentation, in the middle Joule with the initial lines of the documentation text entered, on the right Joule with the final lines of the documentation entered, where the field names are listed in the order they should appear in the list report.
Figure 18: The resulting data and code assets visualized in SAP Build Code as well as the resulting SAP Fiori elements application UI consisting of a list report and an object page. ALT Text: the image contains three screenshots. On the left SAP Build Code showing the generated entities; in the middle the generated list report UI with five lines of data; on the right the generated object page with the header and a “Contract Details” section containing nine fields.Figure 18: The resulting data and code assets visualized in SAP Build Code as well as the resulting SAP Fiori elements application UI consisting of a list report and an object page. ALT Text: the image contains three screenshots. On the left SAP Build Code showing the generated entities; in the middle the generated list report UI with five lines of data; on the right the generated object page with the header and a “Contract Details” section containing nine fields.

In case you need more flexibility than provided by the SAP Fiori elements patterns, we also provide AI-enablement for freestyle SAPUI5. Read about it in this blog post:

Further UI Technology Innovations

Here are some further new capabilities I’d like to bring to your attention.

New features of SAP Fiori elements based on OData V4, explained in this blog post:

If you program the UI of your new application using SAPUI5 and the flexible programming model, you’ll want to ensure good code quality. To help you with that, we bring you UI5 linter, a powerful static code analysis tool:

These blog posts introduce further interesting new features or offerings:

Final words

For more information about our AI innovations, have a look at this article from Philipp Herzig, our Chief AI Officer:

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