Discover the Digital Assistant for the EnterpriseExecutive Q&A on SAP CoPilot with SAP’s Maricel Cabahug

Executive Insights | Feature Story

Q: When did SAP begin to put the concept of a digital assistant for the enterprise into action? A: Late in 2014, I was working with a small develop-

ment team on an early version of an app for the

German National Football Team (DFB). The idea

was to facilitate communication among coaches,

players, trainers, scouts, managers, travel coordi-

nators, and anyone else associated with the team.

The app can be used to send and share information

such as text messages, video, and photos on a secure

platform, as well as engage in private chat room dis-

cussions. While working with the DFB, we started

thinking about how businesses might benefit from

these concepts.

We then began a proof-of-concept project called

“Engage” that looked at how people communicate

with coworkers, for example, concerning a sales

order. The first ideas that led to SAP CoPilot began

there. Beyond being able to share information, we

asked ourselves, “What if the system could also rec-

ognize related business objects from the context of

that interaction?” You could then collect and share

those “live” business objects, not just a static image,

and engage in a whole new way by collaboratively

solving issues in real time with colleagues and with

the system. Thus live sharing and intelligent recog-

nition of the business context was incorporated into

SAP Fiori 2.0. This demonstrated the need for a digi-

tal assistant and its enormous potential.

The thought was that SAP CoPilot could be more

than a productivity tool and become a real digital

assistant, or “copilot,” if you will, that notifies you

when something needs your attention and helps

you complete your business tasks. We started with a

very simple use case of speaking with a digital assis-

tant to create a leave request. The development and

management teams at SAP as well as partners were

very excited by the potential, and we received the

go-ahead for continued investment.

The concept of a conversational user interface (UI) is well established in the consumer world, with Alexa and Siri being the most well-known examples of intelligent digital assistants that can recognize voice commands to complete useful tasks such as scheduling a meeting, turning

up the thermostat, or playing music. But what is the potential impact of a digital assistant in the enterprise? For SAP, the answer to that question depends in large part on the reception of SAP CoPilot, a digital assistant for the enterprise that will be part of SAP Fiori launchpad as an optional component of SAP Fiori 2.0. To find out more about SAP CoPilot, SAPinsider recently caught up with SAP’s Maricel Cabahug, Senior Vice President, Global Head of Design, User Experience and SAP Fiori Product Management, for this exclusive Q&A on SAP’s plans and strategy for rolling out SAP CoPilot.

Subscribe today. Visit SAPinsiderOnline.com.

This article appeared in the Apr May Jun 2017 issue of SAPinsider (www.SAPinsiderOnline.com) and appears here with permission from the publisher, WIS Publishing.

Q: What is the vision for the use of SAP CoPilot in the enterprise? Do you foresee users embracing this technology?A: One of the major advances of SAP Fiori was to

decompose a monolithic ERP solution into task-

based, or activity-based, apps. Individualizing apps

according to a user’s role is more in line with how

people consume and use apps in their personal

lives today — just think about how you use your

smartphone. However, doing that resulted in thou-

sands of apps; in just the latest release of SAP

S/4HANA, for example, which is our core digital

platform, there are about 7,000 apps. Then factor in

all the applications coming from SAP Hybris, SAP

SuccessFactors, Concur, and so forth. Of course, no

one user has to use thousands of apps — only the

ones he or she needs. Nonetheless, it can be a burden

to find the right app for what you want to do.

Conversational UI is a natural progression that

helps to unify the user experience across systems

with different UIs. Users don’t need to know where

to go to get the information they need or find the

right app to perform the task they want to get done.

A digital assistant for the enterprise simplifies that

while at the same time supporting users with smart

insights into an enormous treasure trove of data

stored in the system. It’s not the first time we’re

talking about this, but the technology that is now

available makes it more achievable.

Q: What are some of the challenges in bring-ing a digital assistant to the enterprise?A: One of the biggest challenges is the issue of trust:

How do you design a conversational UI to establish

trust between a human and a machine? We’re look-

ing at many ways to do this, one of which is design-

ing a personality for SAP CoPilot.

Another challenge is that any digital assistant

must learn or increase its knowledge over time,

which is where machine learning factors into the

equation. In human-to-human conversation, each

participant learns to adjust and adapt to the oth-

er’s conversational style. It is natural, therefore,

for humans to learn the best way to communicate

with a digital assistant. For the digital assistant to

learn from humans over time, you have to teach

the machine to understand human language — and

that’s not easy to do. Just think how easy it is for

people to misunderstand each other. It’s the chal-

lenge of natural language processing and meeting

the expectations that people have. If a digital assis-

tant can adapt to the way a person works, it should

also be able to adapt to that person’s specific lan-

guage patterns.

User research is extremely important in defin-

ing any user experience, but especially in this

case because it’s so new. Digital assistants are just

starting to enter the market, and there’s still a lot

of development going on. The way humans and

machines communicate opens up a wide area of

research that is vital in understanding these chal-

lenges because there is very little precedent. To that

end, part of our research has been “Wizard of Oz”

experiments, where a test participant thinks he or

she is communicating with a machine, but is in fact

interacting with a person who is pretending to be

a machine. This method helps the team to under-

stand how people would expect and like a digital

assistant to respond. For example, we are looking

at the sentence structure of the participants: Do

they use command-like language or are they more

polite? At which points in the dialogue do they start

to sound annoyed? Answers to these questions help

us to design a better experience and build trust.

Maricel Cabahug Senior Vice President, Global Head of Design,

User Experience and SAP Fiori Product Management SAP

Subscribe today. Visit SAPinsiderOnline.com.

Q: It sounds like there is a lot of potential for a digital assistant for the enterprise, but there is still a lot to do. What did you decide to focus on first?A: SAP CoPilot is being designed first and foremost to

provide facts, and those facts are the data that is coming

from SAP systems. It won’t be SAP CoPilot’s focus to tell

you the weather in Palo Alto, for example. We know, of

course, that customers trust SAP with their data and

their processes, so it’s a natural extension that they would

trust a digital assistant from SAP to be an interface to

their business. A lot of customers currently involved in

beta testing have said that they’d have the same level of

confidence in a digital or virtual assistant from SAP as

they do in SAP running their business processes.

Q: What use cases do you anticipate for SAP CoPilot?A: There are many use cases. What we’re doing now is

opening that up to all the different product areas in SAP,

the application experts, to develop their own use cases.

SAP S/4HANA is working on use cases for procurement,

using a digital assistant to create a purchase order for a spe-

cific item, for example. Another use case being developed

by a beta customer is to communicate with SAP CoPilot

around days sales outstanding (DSO) metrics. As use cases

emerge, they will be built by SAP, customers, partners, and

the ecosystem to help make SAP CoPilot more intelligent.

When we talk about SAP CoPilot becoming more

intelligent, checking daily DSO figures is a good exam-

ple. Over time, if that’s a daily communication that

you have with SAP CoPilot, it would learn that that

information is something you ask for regularly and

eventually provide the information proactively with-

out being asked. Or, for example, if it knows that you

are managing all the purchasing contracts and one

of the contracts is about to expire, then SAP CoPilot

could proactively remind you that the contract is about

to expire. It could also provide details around all the

sales orders that might not be fulfilled if the contract

isn’t renewed. So you can see some of the things SAP

CoPilot would be able to do based on your usage com-

bined with the information in your SAP systems. We

are also looking into incorporating data extracted from

non-SAP sources, such as from social media.

Q: Will users be able to customize SAP CoPilot, not only according to a business’s unique processes, but also the look and feel?A: Our intention is to allow customers to give

SAP CoPilot the characteristics that best fit their com-

pany — whether that is giving it a name, a gender, a

personality, or their branding. The vision was that

this would always be done at the company level. And

as SAP CoPilot learns from you, your roles, and what

you have access to in SAP systems, that learning and

context will in effect be another layer of personaliza-

tion. This is because SAP CoPilot will become more

and more suited to how you go about your work day. It

adapts to you as an individual and the way you work.

Q: What are the common misconceptions people have about what it means to have a digital assistant for the enterprise? A: One of the biggest misconceptions we see right now

is that people think the development work is done

once the automated speech recognition is settled. The

reality is, however, that automated speech recognition

is just the tip of the iceberg. Designing conversation

itself and incorporating nuances in language is a huge

task, as is overcoming the perception that if a machine

can talk it must be intelligent. For users, SAP CoPilot is

a work in progress, meaning that out of the box it isn’t

going to be as intelligent as it will be after using it for

a month or a year, as it learns from your work patterns.

Along the same lines, there’s a misconception that

once SAP CoPilot is rolled out in English, it’s a simple

matter of translation to roll it out in German and other

languages. This again speaks to the nuances unique to

each language that define what it means to have a natu-

ral conversation; it’s not a one-to-one translation as it

would be for translating text on a screen, for example.

That’s one of the biggest challenges. Because SAP sup-

ports many different languages, the expectation is for

SAP CoPilot to handle multiple languages as well. The

goal is to provide multiple languages for SAP CoPilot,

but it’s not as easy as just translating it from English.

Finally, while SAP CoPilot is at its core a conversa-

tional UI, it’s not purely conversational. Experience

tells us that sometimes it’s faster to deliver informa-

tion with images, graphs, and other UI elements, and to

this point SAP CoPilot is not purely natural language

but rather a multi-modal interaction that will support

graphical user interface elements, gestures, and so

forth. We believe this will ease adoption for users as

they move into interactions driven by artificial intel-

ligence. Business is moving in that direction, and that

context helps crystallize the vision we have for SAP

CoPilot in the enterprise as the personification of

machine learning across SAP products.

Subscribe today. Visit SAPinsiderOnline.com.