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SAP stops most travel and hiring because of AI's soaring cost

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Re: SAP stops most travel and hiring because of AI's soaring cost

#51

Post by notme43 »

victor106 wrote: post #37
notme43 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the ERP space, AI is being used mostly for repetitive tasks, documentation and forecasting-type activities or where a non-deterministic answer might be useful. Scanning in documents and using OCR to create an order, asking what page I use to do X, historical demand modelling and constraint scheduling. Also have seen it used to do order flow type stuff like suggesting products to sell if they buy ABC. I'm not reall…

> Scanning in documents and using OCR to create an order, I remember this being done more than 10 years ago. The other uses cases you describe also were being done. Of course with AI maybe it’s become easier and cheaper?

Yes but it generally expected documents to be in a certain layout and the user had to fill in a lot of the gaps. It's more able to identify elements on an incoming PO, match a supplier invoice, or create a receipt based on a packing list with inference.

EDIT: The other activities, yes I think it made it cheaper and easier. They both required human intervention to make an accurate forecast or execution plan. Forecasting requires humans to do things like apply smoothing factors, identify abormal demand over huge datasets, or identify seasonal demand cycles, etc. Constraint scheduling requires a human to intervene in dispatching and resource allocation as well. AI can do 95% of the work with a proposal, or even control the process. Supposedly much better than historical algorithms. I haven't implemented this part of it, but I've seen it done.

The documentation part is much more robust. You can ask it complex questions, like "How do I setup a phantom blow-through part in a MS level 1 BoM?" and it walks you through the entire thing. With the sales suggestions, it can identify things like "The customer is buying spaghetti and pancetta" AI: "They are probably making carbonara, how about some garlic bread?"

Re: SAP stops most travel and hiring because of AI's soaring cost

#53

Post by spwa4 »

victor106 wrote: post #37
notme43 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the ERP space, AI is being used mostly for repetitive tasks, documentation and forecasting-type activities or where a non-deterministic answer might be useful. Scanning in documents and using OCR to create an order, asking what page I use to do X, historical demand modelling and constraint scheduling. Also have seen it used to do order flow type stuff like suggesting products to sell if they buy ABC. I'm not reall…

> Scanning in documents and using OCR to create an order, I remember this being done more than 10 years ago. The other uses cases you describe also were being done. Of course with AI maybe it’s become easier and cheaper?

Take your favorite OCR software.

Then take a photo of a document and throw it into ChatGPT, or Gemini, along with the word "Transcribe".

ChatGPT wins, by a landslide. BUT AI's advantage doesn't stop there.

"Take this picture of some idiot filling in form 49, I've also attached the PDF, fill in the PDF fields, provide a database record according to the schema attached and flag if there are any obvious problems with the entries".

That works too. "Produce a latex document of this kid's math homework and flag any problems" - works. "Produce a MS word document of this letter" - works. "Read this bill and produce a JSON version following the schema from this example" ... and so on and so forth.

More than that, it is starting to work pretty well with Gemma 31B local model (will still do 30 document analyses on cpu only, at Q4 on a DDR4 or higher machine. Yes it's mostly memory speed that matters) at this point. I mean, that's GPT 5.0 or so quality (95% correct with the occasional problem), but hey, Qwen 3.8 27B may be coming out next week ...

Re: SAP stops most travel and hiring because of AI's soaring cost

#54

Post by happyPersonR »

alexpotato wrote: post #15

Having worked at some giant firms that heavily depend on SAP, I would think their position as "system of record for procurement/production" would get stronger with AI. e.g. AI + a good database of what your company does seems like an excellent combination.

LOL

Although they may internally use LLM, I wanna say said they were not going to allow their core offering to be integrated with LLM

Although maybe they reversed course?

Re: SAP stops most travel and hiring because of AI's soaring cost

#55

Post by lijok »

thelastgallon wrote: post #31
budsniffer952 wrote: post #26

This "AI business" has really opened my eyes to how..insane the average person is, and just how bad discourse has gotten. Look at the conversation: people are writing off this technology (on a tech forum no less) as useless, because it can make mistakes. We criticize the cost, and the business models, and the companies, the purveyors and users. Why? Because we don't quite understand how best to use it...3 years in. P…

This kind of thinking (we'll figure it out how to use it correctly, it is awesome technology) is not new. There was blockchain psychosis (blockchain/crypto solves everything!) for a decade, which is now replaced with AI will solve everything.

What does crypto have to do with this? DuPont has sunk billions into synthetics that were looking for a business model and ultimately proved useless. Why not compare AI to that?

Re: SAP stops most travel and hiring because of AI's soaring cost

#56

Post by mikert89 »

johnbarron wrote: post #39
mikert89 wrote: post #22

The big risk for these platforms is that AI reduces the cost to switch to another ERP. IF AI can map all of the data between two different competitors, the whole business model is finished

That is not what ERPs are used for. Would love to hear how AI is going to help here. This is like a young engineer thinking the CDC machine they just bought, is going to make Airbus and Boeing obsolete...

It’s well known that the moat of system of record is how difficult it is to extract your data into another system.

Re: SAP stops most travel and hiring because of AI's soaring cost

#57

Post by lijok »

budsniffer952 wrote: post #26

This "AI business" has really opened my eyes to how..insane the average person is, and just how bad discourse has gotten. Look at the conversation: people are writing off this technology (on a tech forum no less) as useless, because it can make mistakes. We criticize the cost, and the business models, and the companies, the purveyors and users. Why? Because we don't quite understand how best to use it...3 years in. P…

This isn’t unreasonable at all. AI has promised to cause an unprecedented, continuous disruption to the working class. “Being replaced by robots” - a topic anyone of working age is very familiar with. Why would you be surprised there exists a proportionate amount of pushback in the form of incoherent rhetoric?

Re: SAP stops most travel and hiring because of AI's soaring cost

#58

Post by Zanfa »

frameset wrote: post #32
thelastgallon wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of thinking (we'll figure it out how to use it correctly, it is awesome technology) is not new. There was blockchain psychosis (blockchain/crypto solves everything!) for a decade, which is now replaced with AI will solve everything.

A bit of NFT madness to go with the Blockchain stuff too.

And can’t forget Metaverse and the $70B Meta sunk into it either.

Re: SAP stops most travel and hiring because of AI's soaring cost

#60

Post by zbentley »

mikert89 wrote: post #56
johnbarron wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not what ERPs are used for. Would love to hear how AI is going to help here. This is like a young engineer thinking the CDC machine they just bought, is going to make Airbus and Boeing obsolete...

It’s well known that the moat of system of record is how difficult it is to extract your data into another system.

ERPs are often used as a lot more than a system of record: they’re directly engaged with as the LOB software point-of-contact by many expert employees, and function as a sort of encoding of organizational behavior.

They’re a lot more than a data store or system whose primary value is ingesting info and producing reports.

For a lot of business, replacing the ERP is on par with replacing Excel. It’s not about getting the data into another system; it’s about all of the complexity and expertise required to use it.

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