Generative AI Investments Underscore SAP’s Aim to Create an Open Enterprise AI Ecosystem for the Future
WALLDORF, Germany, July 18, 2023 — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced the next step in its commitment to deliver Business AI that’s relevant, reliable and responsible, making strategic investments in three leading generative AI companies. The investments in Aleph Alpha GmbH, Anthropic PBC and Cohere reinforce SAP’s open ecosystem approach to AI, leveraging the best technology to embed AI across the SAP® portfolio. They build on a series of AI partnerships and enterprise use cases announced in May. They complement a US$1+ billion commitment to invest in AI-powered enterprise technology startups from Sapphire Ventures LLC announced last week.
“We are at a watershed moment, with generative AI poised to fundamentally change how businesses run,” said Sebastian Steinhaeuser, Chief Strategy Officer, SAP SE. “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.”
SAP’s Approach to AI — Built for Business
SAP delivers Business AI that’s relevant, reliable and responsible. The SAP Business AI portfolio is relevant because it’s already embedded into the SAP product portfolio. More than 26,000 customers of cloud solutions from SAP now use SAP Business AI across multiple scenarios and partner solutions. SAP Business AI is relevant because it’s available on day one and built into the mission-critical business processes customers run on SAP software. It’s reliable because it’s built on decades of extensive business data and relevant business content. It’s responsible because it’s delivered with the highest levels of concern for security, privacy, compliance and ethics. This is the AI foundation powered by SAP Business Technology Platform that enables us to innovate and deliver Business AI leveraging SAP’s AI investment and an open ecosystem of AI partners.
SAP’s AI strategy includes direct investments, a significant increase in research and development for additional AI use cases and third-party partnerships, such as those with Microsoft, Google Cloud and IBM announced in May. With the investments announced today, SAP deepens its commitment to generative AI built responsibly and designed to help businesses run better. SAP also accelerates AI innovation by integrating startups into SAP’s partner ecosystem through the SAP.iO Foundries program, its in-house accelerator. Sapphire Ventures, a global software venture capital firm, is backed by SAP and is dedicating over US$1 billion to fund AI-powered enterprise technology startups.
Investment in generative AI innovators
Aleph Alpha, Anthropic and Cohere are generative AI market leaders with unique potential to transform entire industries.
Aleph Alpha GmbH is a Germany-based company that has built a sovereign, full-stack, generative AI solution focused on complex and critical enterprise use cases. Aleph Alpha was the first company to offer multimodal, next-generation large language models and achieve state-of-the-art results with a model trained equally on several European languages. The company focuses on interoperability, data privacy and security, offering both AI as a service as well as multi-cloud and on-premise installation. SAP previously announced Aleph Alpha as an SAP partner participating in the SAP PartnerEdge® program on the “Build” track.
Anthropic PBC is a San Francisco-based AI safety and research company developing AI systems that are helpful, honest and harmless. Anthropic’s AI assistant, Claude, uses a “constitutional” approach – it interacts with users based on a set of Anthropic-designed principles centered on reliability and safety. Claude helps users with a range of tasks, including generating answers, coding, automating workflows and processing text – from editing and rewriting to summarizing, classifying and more – within the context of natural conversations. Anthropic is focused on ensuring technology such as Claude benefits society.
Cohere is a leading enterprise AI company headquartered in San Francisco and Toronto, with a key research center in London. Its world-class technology is tailored for business needs, with a focus on ease of use, accessibility, security and data privacy. The technology unlocks a more intuitive way to generate, search and summarize information. Cohere’s platform is cloud-agnostic to give companies choice in cloud providers, is accessible through API as a managed service and can be deployed on virtual private clouds or on site to meet companies where their data resides.
Sapphire Ventures
SAP-backed Sapphire Ventures LLC is a global software venture capital firm that partners with visionary teams and venture funds to build companies of consequence. As a limited partner in Sapphire Ventures, SAP customers benefit from early access to innovations from the startup ecosystem. Last week, Sapphire Ventures announced a commitment of over US$1 billion to invest in the next generation of AI-powered enterprise technology startups in addition to existing investments in AI-powered enterprise startups like Clari Inc., DataRobot Inc., MoveWORK International and ThoughtSpot Inc.
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About SAP
SAP’s strategy is to help every business run as an intelligent, sustainable enterprise. As a market leader in enterprise application software, we help companies of all sizes and in all industries run at their best: SAP customers generate 87% of total global commerce. Our machine learning, Internet of Things (IoT), and advanced analytics technologies help turn customers’ businesses into intelligent enterprises. SAP helps give people and organizations deep business insight and fosters collaboration that helps them stay ahead of their competition. We simplify technology for companies so they can consume our software the way they want – without disruption. Our end-to-end suite of applications and services enables business and public customers across 25 industries globally to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and make a difference. With a global network of customers, partners, employees, and thought leaders, SAP helps the world run better and improve people’s lives. For more information, visit www.sap.com.
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