SAP this week added artificial intelligence (AI) agents that software developers can leverage to build applications on the SAP Build Code and ABAP platforms.
Those AI agents are based on the same core Joule AI agents that SAP launched in 2023 to automate workflows across its portfolio of applications.
SAP has now extended the reach of those large language models (LLMs) to provide predictive code completion based on context, comments and project heuristics; code explanations of entities; classes, interfaces, functional modules, application programming interfaces (APIs) and documentation.
The overall goal is to reduce application development backlogs by making it simpler for developers to use AI agents to generate ABAP, Java and JavaScript using the family of no-code, low-code and professional software development tools and platforms provided by SAP, says Bharat Sandhu, chief marketing officer for the SAP Business Technology Platform.
Unlike other AI coding tools, however, the SAP Joule AI agents for application developers in addition to generating code and tests will also create user interfaces, data models and sample data, he adds.
Finally, application developers can use SAP Joule to apply business rules using natural language queries.
Joule is based on a set of purpose-built LLMs that have been specifically trained by SAP to automate tasks. That approach reduces the number of hallucinations that might otherwise be encountered using a general-purpose LLM to generate code, says Sandhu.
It also enables SAP to present end users with a single agent that is capable of invoking other agents using an SAP orchestration framework and knowledge graph, versus overwhelming the end user with multiple AI agents that are trained to automate a specific task, he adds.
It’s still early days so far as the adoption of AI agents in the enterprise space is concerned but it’s clear that a raft of manual tasks are about to be automated. In the case of application developers, that means, for example, the need to create the same boiler plate code to invoke the Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment upon which SAP Build is based, will be greatly reduced.
Hopefully, that will translate into them spending more time developing business logic but at the very least it will reduce current rates of burnout and turnover that are largely attributable to having to constantly perform the same repetitive tasks.
It should also serve to make SAP application development platforms more accessible to a wider range of app developers with varying degrees of expertise, notes Sandhu.
The goal, however, is not to replace application developers so much as it is to reduce the level of toil currently required, he adds. “You will still need a human in the loop,” Sandhu says.
Exactly how those humans are spending their time at work, however, will never be the same again as the pace at which applications are being built and deployed increases to a level that not too long ago would have seemed unimaginable.
