New Gen AI and fusion development capabilities in SAP Build help developers collaborate better, leveraging the tools and coding languages of their choice.
By Sid Misra, Vice President Product Marketing – SAP Build, Business Technology Platform (BTP)
Today’s software development teams are facing more pressure than ever. The good news is that new technologies, such as generative AI, are advancing at an extraordinary speed, augmenting development teams to build apps that enable their organizations to run their business better.
Simultaneously, industries from healthcare to manufacturing are racing to digitize their operations to stay competitive, further intensifying the demand for developers. These trends are undoubtedly deepening the global shortage for skilled developers, but they’re also opening a new opportunity to increase productivity of developers.
Step into a new era of application development with generative AI that empowers developers of all skills to create, extend and automate business applications – while overcoming roadblocks which they face today.
Generic AI Solutions
AI presents a powerful set of tools with a growing number of applications for developers. However, as technology shows potential to transform how they operate on a day-to-day basis, it comes with its own set of caveats. As developers increasingly turn to AI that uses Large Language Models that is trained to generate high-quality code for developers to insert into their application, perform code explanation for analysis and understandability, and other uses, the outcome needs to be grounded in business-specific context and data to be truly effective. Without it, the larger benefits of AI will unfortunately be lost.
Starting from Square One
Building new business applications from the ground up is time-consuming and cost-prohibitive for many companies, especially those already managing strapped development teams.
Decision makers are changing the conversation from “Building vs. Buying” new software to “Build (from scratch) vs. Build (pre-built solutions which are industry specific).”
For companies looking to prioritize agility, AI can speed up application development and automation with the ability to rapidly customize these pre-built solutions to tailor the solutions to meet specific business needs.
Untapped Expertise
In many organizations though, professional developers, who have in-depth software knowledge, are not tapping into the expertise of the business experts in supply chain, finance, and other functions who have insight into business functions but may not possess deep software development skills.
This leaves development teams to piece together a puzzle without the benefits of cross-department expertise, a scenario that must be solved to create differentiated business applications.
Fragmented Systems
Integration is currency for today’s developers. The less they can switch between different environments and tools, the more efficiently they can work. In addition, with the current silos and layers between cloud application development platforms and business applications, development teams spent a lot and resources to enhance, customize and connect their existing business applications.
How Developers can Overcome these Obstacles
When developers can work together cohesively – whether that’s cross-department communication or simply the set of tools they work within and leverage the power of AI – they can deliver projects faster and find easier ways to enhance business applications.
Business AI
At a base level, generative AI can help optimize workflows and generate code, accelerating the development process. But beyond generic capabilities, AI models can be trained on your business’ context, incorporating industry best practices and understanding your unique operational processes. This personalized approach ensures that the solutions developed are perfectly aligned with your company’s needs.
With the new improvements within SAP Build at SAP TechEd 2024, developers will be able to use our generative AI copilot, Joule, to automate workflows and generate high-quality code, unit test and provide code explanations that comply with customers’ development models. Developers will be able to enhance Joule with custom skills as well, integrating it seamlessly with both SAP and non-SAP applications. This flexibility allows developers to accelerate their coding processes while meeting customers’ specific needs and demands.
Tools for All Expertise
As organizations prioritize agility and innovation, the advent of new pro-code and low-code technologies offer developers a diverse toolkit to increase their productivity. This “fusion development approach” – integrating different skillsets, tools, and practices – and fostering collaboration across development teams working with various sets of tools and technologies.
Developers can choose the right tool for each task based on complexity, skillset, and project requirements. The result is a substantial increase in development speed and quality, reducing the time to market for new solutions with the resources organizations have at hand.
With recently announced updates to SAP Build, developers regardless of skill set, whether it is low-code, Java or JavaScript or ABAP, have a common and unified environment for coding, testing, integrations, and lifecycle management that pushes them to develop faster and break down silos.
Pre-Built Solutions Industry Specific Solutions
By arming AI models with important business context, companies can also capitalize on pre-built solutions that give teams a significant head-start on building new applications. Rather than building new applications from scratch, developers can equip themselves with solutions tailored to their needs – saving time and effort.
In SAP Build, we’ve equipped developers with more than 500+ pre-built solutions, along with guides and wizards to easily discover and deploy them for their needs. By the end of 2024, our generative AI copilot Joule will be augmented with multi-agent system capabilities that help solve business problems by automating complex workflows across several lines of business. This will include two out-of-the-box autonomous AI agent use cases for dispute management and financial accounting, which will streamline processes to analyze and resolve a range of different dispute resolution and finance scenarios.
Deep Integration with Business Applications
Development platforms need to provide native integration and connectivity to business applications for developers to easily extend core business applications. SAP Build provides deep integration with SAP and non-SAP applications, helping developers extend their business applications with confidence.
With SAP Build we have streamlined the developer experience related to extending business applications. The new SAP Build extensibility wizard in SAP S/4HANA Cloud allows developers to access SAP Build capabilities directly from within S/4HANA. This enables seamless addition of custom fields, logic, processes automations, and creation of custom applications while maintaining business context. SAP Build provides familiar identity, security and API’s and connect your SAP and non-SAP applications with 1000+ connectors, integrations flows and business events.
Unleashing Application Development with SAP Build
Enhancing productivity for developers is at the core of our work at SAP. That’s why with the latest SAP Build updates we’ve brought together all the key development tools that allow teams to collaborate regardless of skill set, integrating seamlessly with both SAP and non-SAP applications. We believe SAP Build is more than just a suite of development tools. It’s a gateway to faster, more efficient application development and automation—and we’re thrilled to bring developers more ways to improve and streamline their experience.
Learn more about the latest improvements to SAP Build
