SAP and Nvidia Announce Deal to 'Fine Tune' AI Models

By Eric J. Savitz

Source : Nvidia AI Conference: GTC 2024 (barrons.com)

One of the most obvious things about artificial intelligence is that its power comes from access to vast troves of data. And when it comes to enterprise software, no one touches more crucial corporate data than the German-based software giant SAP.

As Barron’s laid out in a recent Tech Trader column, SAP is well positioned to take advantage of the trend. CEO Christian Klein said in a recent interview that the company’s access to the most basic kinds of corporate financial, sales, and HR data makes it better positioned than rivals like Microsoft and Salesforce to revolutionize the way companies glean insights from their data.

“No other software company has access to as much business data as we have,” Klein told Barron’s. “The more data you have, the better it is...no matter if you do pricing with SAP, or order management, or logistics....We are not only relevant, we are reliable, because we have this access to a ton of business data.”

At the Nvidia GTC developers conference on Monday, SAP announced an initiative to team up with Nvidia on “SAP Business AI,” a platform that adds business-specific generative AI capabilities to the SAP Joule copilot software.

SAP said it will work with Nvidia to “fine tune” large language models for specific vertical markets. Among other things, the company plans to deploy applications using Nvidia’s new NIM microservices platform, which makes it easier to connect applications, large language models, and cloud computing services.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement that SAP is “sitting on a gold mine of enterprise data that can be transformed into customer generative AI agents to help customers automate their businesses.”

Shares of SAP were up 6% in after-hours trading on Monday.