New SAP Learning Journey: Discovering High-Value Use Cases for Agentic AI

On July 21, SAP will launch a new AI-related learning journey, "Discovering High-Value Opportunities for Agentic AI," the next enablement chapter after providing the SAP Learning Journey "Applying a Human-Centered Approach to Identify and Define Business AI Use Cases" in November 2024.

This latest course will enable attendees to facilitate a new Joule Agent Discovery Workshop, guide workshop participants to identify appropriate use cases, and tailor the workshop format to the needs of different audiences.

But what are SAP solutions for agentic AI? What do they stand for?

Joule Agents are AI systems that autonomously plan and execute multi-step workflows, collaborating to connect departments, speed up decisions, and streamline processes.

Discovering high-value opportunities for agentic AI

In the format of an SAP Expert Lecture, this course introduces participants to the Joule Agent Discovery Workshop, a structured and collaborative method to identify high-value agentic use cases in an organization. Attendees will learn how to inspire and guide participants, prioritize ideas, and describe the selected opportunities in detail. The course also covers how to adapt the workshop to different timeframes, team sizes, and virtual settings. By the end, attendees will be able to guide participants in identifying where AI agents can make the biggest impact and lay the groundwork for their agentic journey.

In detail, learners will be able to:

• Understand the purpose and structure of the Joule Agent Discovery Workshop and how it can be used to identify high-value agentic use cases
• Facilitate the workshop exercises, guiding participants from idea generation to prioritization and a detailed description of agentic use cases
• Adapt the workshop format to different team sizes, virtual environments, and timeframes to fit organizational needs

There are no prerequisites for this course, but experience with SAP Design Thinking and workshop facilitation will be helpful. It is a good learning opportunity for a variety of roles such as support consultant, business user, and SAP rookie.

The creative mind behind SAP AppHaus methods and this learning journey

For many years now, Karen Detken, an expert user experience designer at the SAP AppHaus, has worked in customer co-innovation projects and has gotten firsthand experiences and feedback when developing and hosting a variety of workshop formats with different methods and tools. Early on, the team decided to share these best practices and their tools and templates in the openly accessible innovation toolkit.

When the topic of artificial intelligence arose and SAP solutions started to include generative AI and large language models (LLMs) in their solutions, such as SAP Business AI, followed by the latest step up with agentic AI, such as Joule Agents, the SAP AppHaus team worked with customers on exploring appropriate business use cases to benefit from this very latest in technology. Based on these first experiences, the team started sharing helpful methods, as a co-innovation frontrunner, so that other teams, partners, and customers could drive their own exploration projects involving latest technologies.

For Detken, it is not only about enabling in and applying those technologies: "New technologies are developing very fast and are becoming widely accessible," she said. "What is important is that we have a very clear picture of why we want to use the technologies. Because technology only has a value when you find the right purpose to use it. Customers and users need to be clear about the outcomes they want to have with that technology. This is the first thing you need to answer before using it. With the methods we provide, we intend to help people first understand what this technology can do for them, for the business, for the people."

This awareness and very conscious use of technology also includes the consideration of responsible and ethical guidelines that every new solution needs to follow (see SAP's principles laid out in the SAP AI Ethics Handbook).

Bringing innovation and technology into the hands of people

The SAP AppHaus team gets feedback from many different customer and partner teams. For the team of experienced co-innovation coaches, it is fulfilling to see workshop participants, along with attendees of enablement sessions, understand the new technology better. From this deeper understanding they help participants - along their human-centered approach - start generating ideas related to their business needs. They help them, as Detken puts it, "think of different ways how they can use AI to solve real problems."

The latest SAP Learning Journey for agentic AI is a compilation of helpful exercises to help customers and partners explore and approach this field of technology while discovering meaningful business use cases. In parallel and probably not that obvious at first sight, this new course testifies the openness of the team for novel applications such as using an avatar as speaker. It was built based on video recordings with Detken.

When asked about her view on agentic AI in contrast to generative AI, Detken describes it as follows: "Generative AI uses an LLM as a kind of intelligent system or 'brain.' The same LLMs are used by an AI agent. The difference is that the agent can not only 'think' and use these large language models to generate content or analyze data and make decisions, but it also uses 'tools' or other applications to act upon these decisions or make changes autonomously. To put it as an example: with Gen AI, we only had the brain and now it's the next step, we have the brain and the hands. Maybe in the future, we will have the entire body as well, which would probably be the robots."

Imke Vierjahn is the communications lead for SAP AppHaus.

Images courtesy of SAP employee Viktor Georg