Software giant SAP SE said today it’s expanding its long-running partnership with IBM Corp. to embed IBM Watson artificial intelligence smarts into its wide range of enterprise resource planning systems.

The company said IBM Watson will be integrated with numerous offerings, including its digital assistant SAP Start, which serves as a unified entry point into its cloud-based software.

SAP is one of the world’s biggest ERP software companies, providing a centralized system for large businesses to share and access common data across departments. With SAP’s tools, businesses can manage all of their primary functions in one place, including sales, marketing, human resources and procurement. It allows each department to communicate and plan operations through a single software system.

SAP Start enables users to search for, launch and engage with the company’s entire solution of ERP applications. With the new Watson-powered AI capabilities, users will be able to engage in natural language to quickly access the tools and resources they need and derive predictive insights, SAP said.

The same capabilities will be extended across much of its product suite, helping to provide quick insights and answer diverse questions for managers and other workers. In this way, SAP says, it will be able to automate and speed up many common tasks, boosting employee productivity and freeing people to focus on more strategic work. Users will benefit from added intelligence when it comes to strategic decision-making, plus the ability to extract the information they need quickly from various company data sources, the company said.

“This milestone collaboration with IBM aims to provide SAP customers a better user experience, faster decision-making and greater insights to help transform their business processes,” said SAP Chief Executive Christian Klein. “Working together to incorporate additional AI, machine learning and other intelligent technologies into SAP solutions can lead to better business outcomes for our joint customers.”

According to SAP, IBM Watson AI has already been integrated with the software giant’s Concur’s TripIt mobile application to provide almost 13 million users with AI-informed weather insights to aid in travel planning. SAP said it also offers more than 25 intelligent, industry-specific applications for customers that leverage IBM Watson AI. They include apps for retail, manufacturing, utilities and other sectors.

Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE that today’s announcement is all about introducing natural language queries to ERP data. It will be beneficial for end users, he said, but he wondered why SAP hadn’t already done so before.

“This is something that SAP and IBM could have done a few years ago already,” Mueller pointed out. “The partnership is probably more of a win for IBM than it is for SAP, which already partners with the generative AI leaders Microsoft and Google. Don’t be surprised if we see SAP embrace more partnerships in future.”

SAP plans to lean on IBM Watson’s AI capabilities even more heavily in future. The company explained that it’s working with IBM on various generative AI and large language models that will deliver continuous learning and automation for customers.

IBM’s Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna said his company is joining forces with SAP to harness AI’s transformational power in new ways, so their customers can use it as a source of competitive advantage.

Image: IBM