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.
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.
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.
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.
As AI tools make technical knowledge more accessible, successful consultants must excel in areas that AI cannot replicate. Key soft skills become crucial, including:
These human-centric capabilities are essential for translating AI-generated insights into real business value and ensuring successful implementation of solutions.
As a managed services and SAP resourcing specialist we are focusing on two main pillars:
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.
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:
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.
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.
For developers working on low-code or SAP developments we leverage the following tools to help accelerate our delivery:
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.