Dear SAP Community,

Did you get the chance to get your hands on the AI Foundation on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) yet?

AI Foundation is SAP’s all-in-one AI toolkit, offering developers AI that’s ready-to-use, customizable, grounded in business data, and supported by leading generative AI foundation models. It is also the basis for AI capabilities that SAP embeds across its portfolio.

For more information about the different layers of the AI Foundation stack represented below, we suggest you reading this blog post.

In Q4 2023, our teams delivered a set of product innovations for the AI Foundation so you can build relevant, reliable and responsible AI-infused business applications and extensions with security, governance and trust in mind. Let’s delve into the highlights!

AI Services – Document Information Extraction

General availability of Document Information Extraction, premium edition

We have supercharged our existing Document Information Extraction service with generative AI capabilities and launched Document Information Extraction, premium edition.

Users can now process documents intelligently across their entire business, with:

• The automatic extraction of unstructured data by simply describing the required fields that you need, and watching the solution do the heavy lifting for nearly every document type.
• The multilingual support for over 40 languages, catering to global businesses with diverse document types.

With no manual annotation and resource-intensive ML training required anymore, business document processing use cases can be onboarded in days, not weeks or months, reducing the time-to-value drastically.

To get started, read this blog post by our product manager and complete this tutorial.

AI Services – SAP Translation Hub

Consumption of the machine translation service using a user interface

Users can now use an intuitive user interface to consume the Document Translation service from SAP Translation Hub. This comes in addition to the existing API and makes it quick and easy for users to machine translate their documents and texts.

The service can be enabled using a booster, which allows users with an SAP Translation Hub license to configure the service without having to technically interact with SAP Business Technology Platform. Document Translation from SAP Translation Hub is already available on the multi-cloud Foundation for SAP BTP, and we are working to complete our migration of the remaining SAP Translation Hub functionalities from the Neo environment in early 2024.

Get started with this blog post and watch the video below.

Generative AI Management – Generative AI Hub

General availability of Generative AI Hub

You can now fast-track your generative AI development of SAP BTP apps with the new Generative AI Hub, giving you instant access to a broad range of large language models (LLMs) from different providers, such as GPT-4 by Azure OpenAI or OpenSource Falcon-40b.
With this access, you’ll be able to orchestrate multiple models, whether programmatically via SAP AI Core or via the playground within SAP AI Launchpad.

The generative AI hub provides tooling for prompt engineering, experimentation, and other capabilities to accelerate the development of BTP applications infused with generative AI, in a secure and trusted way. AI development teams can submit a prompt to multiple LLMs, compare the generated outcomes to identify the best-suited model for the task, and gain greater control and transparency with the built-in prompt history.

Read this blog post from our product manager to learn more or start the tutorial right away.

AI Workload Management – SAP AI Core

SDK for support of large language models

We released several features as part of SAP AI Core:

• Technical libraries that simplify inference on large language models (LLMs) by automatically injecting the correct headers and paths into each request.
• Tooling for the effective integration and use of LLMs with LangChain in the context of the generative AI hub
• A new library, the ai-core-llm-sdk, in addition to enhancements to the existing ai-core-sdk, to accommodate the required changes to support LLM access

These capabilities will help to:

• Improve the extensibility, allowing users to add additional adaptations as needed
• Simplify the developer experience with ready-to-use libraries for access to LLMs deployed using the generative AI hub
• Facilitate advanced LLM processes by delivering ready-made integration for use with LangChain
• Boost the efficiency when working with various LLM models by streamlining the deployment of LLM models and the querying of available models

Business Data & Context – SAP HANA Cloud

New fairness support with decision-making based on ML models using the Predictive Analysis Library (PAL) for SAP HANA Cloud

We introduced a FairML function for PAL algorithms, to mitigate unfairness in machine learning model predictions related to affected groups identified by features such as gender, race, age, or other protected classes. This new FairML function supports hybrid gradient boosting tree (HGBT) binary classification and regression models.

It enables data scientists and application developers using SAP HANA Cloud to:

• Build ML models that mitigate unfairness with respect to human sensitive data to decrease disparities, avoid harm, and ensure fairness in decision-making
• Avoid unfairness to any group in AI-augmented decisions on humans such as college admission, job candidate selection, or personal credit evaluation
• Comply with AI ethics to prevent discrimination by AI systems against specific demographic groups

This example shows how to build a FairML classifier model and how the model mitigates harm to affected age-groups indicated by balancing the false positive rage (FPR) of the model

If you want to find out more about how you can ensure ethical and responsible AI practice using the new capabilities in SAP HANA Cloud, check out the links below:

• Technical Blog – Fairness in Machine Learning a new feature in SAP HANA PAL
• SAP Blog – SAP HANA Cloud introduces fairness in machine learning
• SAP Blog – What’s New in SAP HANA Cloud December 2023
• New features in SAP HANA Cloud PAL 2023 Q4, Machine learning client 2.19

Build business-ready AI applications with SAP and stay updated!

▶︎ Get started with the AI Foundation on SAP Discovery Center, by comparing and selecting the service that fits most to your business needs.

▶︎ Explore the AI Foundation roadmap to discover our past and upcoming product innovations in 2024 and beyond.

▶︎ Engage with our community of SAP experts through blog posts and the SAP Answers platform.

See you next quarter!