SAP has committed to investing in several generative AI startups to make their technologies more readily available to the vendor’s service, sales, and commerce customers.
These startups include Aleph Alpha GmbH, Anthropic PBC, and Cohere, which will add their AI technologies to SAP’s enterprise AI ecosystem.
The company is making a $1+ billion investment commitment to back each startup through its investing arm, Sapphire Ventures LLC.
Sebastian Steinhaeuser, Chief Strategy Officer, SAP SE, said:
We are at a watershed moment, with generative AI poised to fundamentally change how businesses run.
“SAP is committed to creating an enterprise AI ecosystem for the future that complements our world-class business applications suite and helps our customers unlock their full potential.”
In May, SAP announced partnerships with Microsoft, Google Cloud, IBM, and others to improve its AI offering.
Aleph Alpha, Anthropic, and Cohere
Aleph Alpha, based in Germany, has a full-stack generative AI solution designed for complex enterprise use cases.
It was the first company to provide multimodal, large language models with a model trained in several European languages.
Aleph Alpha offers AI as a service, plus multi-cloud and on-premise installation.
It was previously announced as an SAP partner, joining the SAP ParternEdge program on the “Build” track.
Anthropic, based in San Francisco, is an AI safety and research company that creates AI systems, including its AI assistant Claude.
Claude is a ChatGPT competitor, helping users by generating answers, coding, automating workflows, and processing text through editing, rewriting, summarizing, classifying, and more, with a natural, human-like style.
Zoom is embedding Claude into its CCaaS platform following its partnership with Anthropic.
Cohere is headquartered in San Francisco and Toronto, with a research center in London. The AI-focused company offers ease of use, accessibility, security, and data privacy within its tailored business solutions.
Cohere enables users to generate, search and summarise information via its cloud-agnostic platform, which gives companies the freedom to choose their own cloud providers.
The managed service can be accessed as an API and deployed onsite or through virtual private clouds.
Salesforce’s new product suite, “AI Cloud”, has been designed to accommodate Anthropic and Cohere alongside several other generative AI innovators.
SAP’s AI Strategy and Approach
The company’s strategy involves direct investments, an increase in AI research and development for new use cases, and third-party partnerships.
SAP believes its latest investments strengthen its commitment to generative AI, as well as accelerate innovation by integrating these startups into its partner ecosystem via the SAP.iO Foundries program.
The vendor summarizes its approach to its Business AI offering as “relevant, reliable, and responsible”.
It justifies its relevance because it has been embedded into its product portfolio, with more than 26,000 customers using its various cloud solutions.
Business AI is reliable due to the extensive data and content that it is built on,
Finally, it says that its work to ensure top-level security, privacy, compliance, and ethics with its AI solutions demonstrates its responsibility.
At the company’s Q1 2023 earnings call, it revealed plans to introduce disruptive generative AI innovation.
Meanwhile, SAP sold its stake in Qualtrics to Silver Lake and CPP Investments for $12.5 billion in March this year.
The company’s CEO, Chrisitan Klein, said at the earnings call that the sale of Qualtrics enables SAP to focus more on its portfolio and increase cloud growth and profitability.
