SAP wants to bring together automation, machine learning and artificial intelligence in a single stack

The software giant will release a single end-to-end stack next year

SAP has said that it will be iterating on its current machine learning tools to embed robotic process automation (RPA) capabilities into products across its portfolio.

The company is investing in RPA to help automate repetitive processes across its portfolio, like data entry and accounting. Speaking at SAP's annual TechEd conference in Barcelona, chief innovation officer Juergen Mueller said:

"With intelligent robotic process automation, our customers will be able to achieve the high automation level necessary to become an intelligent enterprise.

"Machine learning acts here as the brain that is managing exceptions and guides the RPA bot to execute on desired processes. With our enterprise-grade offer for SAP Conversational AI, we have taken a step further than our previously announced industry-specific packaged bots. The expansion allows customers to automate their customer support with chat bots. These updates, together with new smart analytics capabilities, are the next big milestone to bring intelligence to our customers."

The company also announced that it is expanding the capabilities of its Leonardo Machine Learning initiative, to make it easier to build corporate chatbots using its Conversational AI. (formerly known as Recast.AI).

"Building a performing bot for corporations usually takes nine months. We've reduced it to nine weeks. Our goal is to make it to nine days, and our Enterprise Grade offer is one step closer to making this a reality," said Omer Biran, MD of SAP Conversational AI.

SAP plans to roll out the Conversational AI this month. The company is also investing in other machine learning capabilities, for data scientists to train their own custom ML models.

By early 2019 SAP intends to bring RPA, machine learning and conversational AI together under a single end-to-end automation stack known as ‘intelligent robotic process automation'.