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When SAP ran a quiet inner experiment to gauge marketing consultant attitudes towards AI, the outcomes had been placing. 5 groups had been requested to validate solutions to greater than 1,000 enterprise necessities accomplished by SAP’s AI co-pilot, Joule for Consultants — a workload that may usually take a number of weeks.
4 groups had been advised the evaluation had been accomplished by junior interns contemporary out of college. They reviewed the fabric, discovered it spectacular, and rated the work about 95% correct.
The fifth crew was advised the exact same solutions had come from AI.
They rejected virtually all the things.
Solely when requested to validate every reply one after the other did they uncover that the AI was, in truth, extremely correct — surfacing detailed insights the consultants had initially dismissed. The general accuracy? Once more, about 95%.
“The lesson realized right here is that we must be very cautious as we introduce AI — particularly in how we talk with senior consultants about its prospects and the right way to combine it into their workflows,” says Guillermo B. Vazquez Mendez, chief architect, RI enterprise transformation and structure, SAP America Inc.
The experiment has since turn out to be a revealing place to begin for SAP’s push towards the marketing consultant of 2030: a practitioner who’s deeply human, enabled by AI, and now not weighed down by the technical grunt work of the previous.
Overcoming AI skepticism
Resistance isn’t stunning, Vazquez notes. Consultants with two or three many years of expertise carry monumental institutional information — and an comprehensible diploma of warning.
However AI copilots like Joule for Consultants will not be changing experience. They’re amplifying it.
“What Joule actually does is make their very costly time far simpler,” Vazquez says. “It removes the clerical work, to allow them to deal with turning out high-quality solutions in a fraction of the time.”
He emphasizes this message continually: “AI just isn’t changing you. It’s a instrument for you. Human oversight is at all times required. However now, as an alternative of spending your time in search of documentation, you’re gaining vital time and boosting the effectiveness and element of your solutions.”
The marketing consultant time-shift: from tech execution to enterprise perception
Traditionally, consultants spent about 80% of their time understanding technical methods — how processes run, how information flows, how capabilities execute. Clients, against this, spend 80% of their time targeted on their enterprise.
That mismatch is precisely the place Joule steps in.
“There’s a niche there — and the bridge is AI,” Vazquez says. “It flips the time equation, enabling consultants to take a position extra of their power in understanding the client’s trade and enterprise targets. AI takes on the heavy technical carry, so consultants can deal with driving the appropriate enterprise outcomes.”
Bringing new consultants on top of things
AI can also be reworking how new hires be taught.
“We’re excited to see Joule appearing as a bridge between senior consultants, who’re adapting extra slowly, and interns and new consultants who’re already technically savvy,” Vazquez says.
Junior consultants ramp up quicker as a result of Joule helps them function independently. Seniors, in the meantime, have interaction the place their perception issues most.
That is additionally the place many consultants be taught the basics of at the moment’s AI copilots. A lot of the work is determined by immediate engineering — for example, instructing Joule to behave as a senior chief expertise architect specializing in finance and SAP S/4HANA 2023, then asking it to research enterprise necessities and ship the output as tables or PowerPoint slides.
As soon as they grasp the right way to body prompts, consultants persistently get higher-quality, extra structured solutions.
New architects are additionally capable of talk extra clearly with their extra skilled counterparts. They know what they don’t know and might ask focused questions, which makes mentorship far smoother. It’s created an actual synergy, Vazquez provides — senior consultants see how rapidly new hires are adapting and studying with AI, and that momentum encourages them to maintain tempo and undertake the expertise themselves.
Waiting for the way forward for AI copilots
“We’re nonetheless within the child steps of AI — we’re toddlers,” Vazquez says. “Proper now, copilots depend upon immediate engineering to get good solutions. The higher you immediate, the higher the reply you get.”
However that represents solely the earliest section of what these methods will finally do. As copilots mature, they’ll transfer past responding to prompts and begin deciphering total enterprise processes — understanding the sequence of steps, figuring out the place human intervention is required, and recognizing the place an AI agent might take over. That shift is what leads straight into agentic AI.
SAP’s depth of course of information is what makes that evolution doable. The corporate has mapped greater than 3,500 enterprise processes throughout industries — a repository Vazquez calls “a few of the most respected, rigorously examined processes developed within the final 50 years.” Day-after-day, SAP methods help roughly $7.3 trillion in world commerce, giving these rising AI brokers a wealthy basis to navigate and cause over.
“With that degree of course of perception and information, we are able to take an actual leap ahead,” he says, “equipping our consultants with agentic AI that may clear up advanced challenges and push us towards more and more autonomous methods.”
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