SAP Consulting in an AI world

SAP Consulting using AI

Is traditional consulting over? 

In February, AI app Perplexity debuted its ‘Deep Research’ feature, referring to it as ‘Consultant as a service.’ What does this mean for SAP consultants?

In this article we will explore the impacts, share thoughts and explain how we at VMG Labs is embracing this opportunity.

SAP themselves are of course also driving the hype with SAP’s CEO Christian Klein saying:

“Joule will also become the biggest productivity engine for every SAP end user and that by the end of the year, 80% of the most used tasks will be managed via Joule, making the 300 million end users of SAP products 20% more productive.” - Christian Klein

As SAP consultants — should we be worried about our jobs? In short yes - but those that adopt and leverage AI intelligently can help clients get to business value faster. 

Impacts

Junior positions will suffer

Getting into consulting roles for juniors will be harder, experienced teams with the right tools become more effective - doing more with less. The need to get juniors to do “the grunt work” is becoming less - we have experienced significant improvements in: Analysis, data preparation, testing, documentation and coding.

As technology providers embed more AI into their platforms we find more clients are able to self-serve and reduce their reliance on external consulting.

Clients expectations are higher

With powerful tools, solving problems should be quicker, clients can quickly frame problems and get potential answers earlier in the process. Experience counts, knowing when AI tools are hallucinating and knowing how to design efficient prompts with the right tools is key.

All functional areas get impacted

No matter which area you consult in, SAP will be providing AI solutions. The CFO can complete financial reports faster and more accurately, the COO can make entire supply chains more resilient, and the CHRO can plan personnel deployment more efficiently. The development team can use smart tools to automatically generate and test code.

Soft skills become more important

As AI tools make technical knowledge more accessible, successful consultants must excel in areas that AI cannot replicate. Key soft skills become crucial, including:

• Emotional intelligence and relationship building
• Change management and stakeholder alignment
• Complex problem solving and strategic thinking
• Effective communication across all organizational levels

These human-centric capabilities are essential for translating AI-generated insights into real business value and ensuring successful implementation of solutions.

What VMG is doing?

As a managed services and SAP resourcing specialist we are focusing on two main pillars:

• Education - ensuring our team is up to speed with core AI principles and mandating certain courses in prompt engineering and security.
  
  
• Tooling - we are providing consultants with curated tooling to ensure effective delivery and balancing clients sensitive information. Depending on your role (consulting, development, support or cyber) - we provide tools to our support our colleagues.

In the next chapter, we will explore the key benefits and advantages that low-code and no-code platforms bring to organizations, from accelerated delivery and cost efficiency to enhanced collaboration and business agility.

Education

Outside of learning about SAP specific AI tools (aka Joule) and how it impacts the products - we ensure all our consultants undertake basic prompt engineering courses.

Here is the recommended one from developers from deepAI:

Our Current Tooling

Depending on your delivery role we provide various AI tools as part of our value-add. We are continuously evaluating new capabilities, depending on our services agreements with clients, we can also extend these tools to help their own internal teams. Please contact us for more details or a demo of any or our tooling.

For SAP Consultants

VMG Labs has deployed PerplexityAI Pro for consultants working on SAP assignments. The solution includes all of our “organizational files” which contains all our project learnings and reference material for undertaking projects. 

Perplexity Pro's collaborative features include shared spaces where consultants can document and refine questions, a knowledge base that learns from past problem solving sessions, and the ability to create custom collections of reference materials.

Developers

For developers working on low-code or SAP developments we leverage the following tools to help accelerate our delivery:

• GitHub Co-Pilot - coding assistant in VSCode
• CursorAI - here is a blog post on how we use it with SAP developments
• Claude - Coding and API access for building specific use cases
• Google Gemini - Coding review and test case development

Will you join us?

If you are a forward thinking client or consultant, by partnering with VMG Labs we can help leverage the latest tools - all without paying the "Big 4" price tag.