As technology continues to advance, companies look into theses advancements to see what they can use to improve their products and services. SAP is no different in this regard, they have begun looking into artificial intelligence and machine learning in order to improve their products and services. This however is not the main point that has caught my interest within the article, the thing that has caught my interest is that SAP is looking to use the research in AI and machine learning to improve their cloud based services. By leveraging this new technology for their cloud services they are able to provide information on which vendor is the best overall within their system. However, by adding in AI and machine learning into their cloud product they had a need to shift to a quarterly update schedule of their products. By shifting to a quarterly schedule they are able to tweak the algorithms in their system to better reflect the needs of the customers. Now this is an interesting shift within their business model where traditionally their on-site products would only get updated annually. From what I can see, SAP’s customers that are using the on-site version of their software may want to have this new technology as part of their systems but it still remains to be seen if SAP will be willing to bring it to them with the large development cycle that is needed in order to make this function mature enough.
Reference: https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/09/sap-brings-ai-and-integrated-analytics-in-latest-cloud-release/