For many organizations, productivity discussions and digital transformation initiatives are constant priorities. Yet, teams often find themselves working within the same complex SAP transactions they’ve relied on for years. These processes, while powerful, can feel slow and rigid compared to today’s expectations for speed and simplicity.
Imagine if those same transactions could be powered by an intelligent assistant — one that understands your needs and provides answers before you even finish asking. That’s exactly what SAP AI ChatACS offers: a smarter, faster way to interact with SAP. Rather than adding complexity, it makes your SAP systems more intuitive, responsive, and aligned with how people naturally work.
You hear a lot about AI these days, from a generative AI model writing a poem to creating stunning images from a simple text prompt. But how does that translate to the very practical, often rigid world of enterprise resource planning?
The new SAP ChatACS AI gives a powerful answer. It's an intelligent helper embedded directly within your SAP environment, designed by the ACS team at SAP Germany. Think of it as having a brilliant consultant available 24/7, right inside your S4/HANA or ECC system. This tool connects to the SAP Generative AI hub, letting it use cutting-edge large language models to give smart, context-aware help.
This isn't just about a fancy chatbot window. It is about fundamentally changing how work gets done. You'll learn how this technology can be added with a simple button in your existing transactions or through a conversational chat interface. We recently joined a webinar with Soren Detering of Detering Consulting and Christian Wittmann from SAP, where they demonstrated exactly what this looks like in practice. It was impressive, to say the least. It's a custom AI solution that brings generative AI into the ABAP-based world of SAP where it can make a real difference.
Table Of Contents:
- What Does SAP AI ChatACS Do?
- From Images and Handwriting to Creating SAP Documents
- The Technology Powering SAP AI ChatACS
- Your Questions Answered
- Conclusion
What Does SAP AI ChatACS Do?
So what can this SAP business AI assistant actually do for your business? Imagine your employees dealing with international partners daily. Language barriers can slow things down, creating misunderstandings that cost time and money. With ChatACS, that friction disappears. Inside a transaction like a warranty claim, you might have a long description of a problem written in Chinese. For a team member who doesn't speak the language, that's a roadblock. Usually, this means copying the text, pasting it into a separate translation tool, and then trying to make sense of the output.
SAP's Christian showed how simple this becomes with an AI-powered button. With a single click, the Chinese text was translated into perfect English, right there on the screen. It didn't stop there, though. To show the power and flexibility of the language models, he even translated the text into a dialect (here a Texan Cowboy slang). While you probably won't need that for your quarterly reports, it perfectly illustrates the adaptability of the tool. You're not limited to a dropdown menu of pre-selected languages; you can just ask for the language you need. This immediate, practical support speeds up processes and lets your team focus on the actual problem, not on deciphering messages.
Beyond triggering an action via a button, like translate text, ChatACS can launch a full chat experience, a true conversational AI . The AI introduces itself and confirms it has the context of the document you're working on. For instance, if you are looking at a complex warranty claim, you can just ask the AI to 'summarize the claim!' Within seconds, you get a clean summary with key claim data for example the serial number, total cost, and specific failed part. This ability to get an executive summary on demand is a game-changer for managers who need to quickly review dozens of documents a day.
ChatACS is already agentic AI, because it can create SAP documents and trigger actions within them.
You can also ask it to help you write a customer response, perhaps to accept the claim on goodwill. The limits are really set by your imagination, not the software.
From Images and Handwriting to Creating SAP Documents
Here is where things get truly interesting. We all know that work doesn't always come in neatly typed digital formats. You get emails with attachments, photos from the field, and sometimes, handwritten notes on a delivery slip. How do you get that unstructured information into a structured system like SAP? This is often a tedious manual data entry job, ripe for errors. ChatACS offers a much smarter way.
The demo showed a quality management use case. The goal was to create a quality notification based on two images. One was a picture of a delivery note, and the other was a photo of a rusty brake disc. The user simply uploaded both images into the chat window. Without any specific instructions on where to find the data, the AI read the delivery note, a document it had never seen before. It correctly pulled out the customer number, sales order number, part number, and other key details and mapped them to the fields needed to create the quality notification. You could see the extracted information right on the screen for verification.
But the system was missing some information, like the problem type. That's where the second image came in. By analyzing the photo of the rusty brake disc, the AI suggested appropriate defect codes from the system's backend configuration. The AI is not just reading text; it is understanding the visual context. What happened next was also very telling. During the live demo, the AI missed one field, a defect type. Instead of manually hunting down this data point, the defect, Christian simply told the AI in plain language to pick a defect code based on the image he had uploaded.
The AI corrected its course and created the notification. This highlights a key point: the goal isn't to have the AI work with 100% autonomy. The goal is to give your employees a powerful helper that handles about 80% of the tedious work. It speeds things up immensely and reduces errors, but the human is still in control.
It Even Reads Messy Handwriting
You might be thinking, 'That's great for a clean, printed document, but our field notes look like a doctor's prescription out of a washing machine' The team at SAP wondered the same thing. Christian took it a step further: He took a piece of paper and copied the entire delivery note by hand. He then uploaded a photo of his handwriting. The AI read it with comparable accuracy. It was very good at understanding even cursive script.
But what about really messy documents? One customer noted that their documents often have smudges, scribbles, or even coffee spills on them. So, the team literally spilled coffee on a handwritten note and scanned it again. The AI still worked. This is where modern generative AI truly shines compared to traditional Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. Traditional OCR works well with structured, predictable documents. But generative AI can adapt to the endless variations and imperfections of real-world paperwork.
Think about what this means for your processes. A warranty claim could be created from an email with a photo attached. A service order could be started from a technician's handwritten notes. This technology closes the gap between the messy, unstructured world and your clean, structured SAP system.
The Technology Powering SAP AI ChatACS
How is all this possible? This isn't a standalone application but a solution built on SAP's own powerful platform. It uses the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) as its foundation. Specifically, it connects through the AI Core service. The AI Core acts as a secure bridge to various large language models (LLMs) available today. This means you aren't locked into a single AI provider. This architecture also means setup is surprisingly fast. SAP has done the heavy lifting of deploying and managing the cloud infrastructure. For customers, it's a matter of activating their subscriptions.
The ChatACS code solution itself lives inside your S4/HANA or ECC system. It is written in ABAP, the language of SAP. It consists of a few key parts. There is an HTTP connector that talks to BTP, handling authentication and formatting data correctly. Then there's an LLM connector, which is basically an ABAP version of the AI Core API. These building blocks make it simple for ABAP developers to build new AI-powered features. A developer gets a straightforward way to send a prompt to an AI and get the result back in their program. It removes the need for them to be data scientists. They can focus on creating business value.
Your Questions Answered
During the live session, the audience had some excellent questions that you might also be asking. One of the first was about compatibility. Many companies still rely on SAP ECC. The good news is that SAP AI ChatACS works on both S4/HANA and ECC systems. The main limiting factor is the SAP_BASIS release; it needs to be at 750 or higher. There is strong interest in making it available for even older releases like 740, and the team is looking into that.
Another person asked if data can be edited if the AI gets something wrong. For example, what if the AI can't find a customer based on the information in a document? The answer is yes. You can simply talk to the AI and correct it. You can tell it, 'Please use customer 567 instead.' This conversational correction is much faster than finding the right field and manually typing in the change. You can even enhance this by giving the AI tools to search the customer master data itself.
There was also a great question about how this technology compares to rules-based systems like BRF+ or VSR in warranty management. It's not a direct replacement. Instead, it's a powerful enhancement. Some business checks are very difficult to program with rigid logic. For example, how do you check if the customer's long text description actually matches the defect code they selected? That would be nearly impossible with traditional software but is a simple task for an LLM. You would still use VSR as the framework, but you would call the LLM from within it to perform these more nuanced, text-based checks.
What about SAP Fiori apps? Most of the demo was shown in the SAP GUI, but integration with Fiori is definitely possible. Because ChatACS is driven by customer demand, and most early adopters were still heavy GUI users, that's where the focus has been. But colleagues have already built a non-chat version for Fiori with a simple translation button. Building the full chat UI into a Fiori app is also quite straightforward.
Conclusion
What you've seen here is more than just a slick demo. It represents a shift in how we can interact with our core business systems. For years, we've adapted our workflows to the software. Tools like the innovative SAP AI ChatACS adapt the software to our natural way of working and communicating. Whether it's instantly translating text, summarizing complex documents, or creating SAP records from a simple picture, the focus is on saving time and boosting productivity. It lets your team focus on high-value tasks instead of tedious data entry. This is a practical application of AI that you can start using now to make your processes faster, easier, and less prone to error.