SAP SE is injecting more artificial intelligence into its portfolio.

At an event in Barcelona today, the company unveiled a collection of tools aimed at opening up new ways for enterprise customers to harness AI. The additions range from point solutions focused on highly specific tasks to software intended to automate entire workflows.

The most expansive of the bunch is Conversational AI, a new iteration of the company’s Recast.AI chatbot builder that promises to drastically speed up virtual assistant development.

There plenty of tools out there for creating customer support bots, some with drag-and-drop controls accessible to nontechnical users. But SAP claims that developing an assistant sophisticated enough to meet a large enterprise’s needs is still a complicated endeavor. Omer Biran, the managing director for Conversational AI, said a typical project takes nine months.

The new service promises to compress that to nine weeks. It generates advice on how to enhance chatbot performance and packs analytics features that let developers manually look for ways to improve the user experience.

One of the additions is a dashboard for tracking how customers interact with a bot, visibility that SAP said enables companies to find support questions they need to address better. Another new feature lets developers dig into the datasets they use to train an assistant’s AI algorithms to find areas for improvement. SAP has also thrown in a versioning system to help software teams manage the release of bot updates.

For smaller projects that don’t require as much technical know-how, Conversational AI provides an automated bot builder. The tool, currently in alpha, makes it possible to generate a simple assistant in minutes from a pre-prepared script.

SAP announced Conversational AI alongside five AI tools that address some of the most common use cases for machine learning in the enterprise. They can be used to identify objects and text in images, match similar documents based on their contents and convert text into speech or vice versa.

The services will roll out over the next two months. On the longer term, SAP plans to infuse machine learning into its core lineup of business applications in the form of robotic process automation features. RPA is a fast-growing solution category that focuses on harnessing machine learning to automate tasks historically done by humans.

SAP didn’t share much details about the roadmap, only that the RPA features will first roll out for the S/4HANA business management suite in early 2019. The software giant’s entry into the RPA race will increase the competition in what is already a crowded segment.

SAP’s introduction of the AI features comes against the backdrop of rival Oracle Corp.’s OpenWorld conference, where the company introduced new machine learning capabilities of its own. Among the additions are specialized chatbots designed to automate common accounting and human resource management tasks.

Photo: SAP