Welcome to the third part of our blog series where we explore how SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) is revolutionizing retail by enabling predictive insights, personalized interactions and ultimately prosperity in the enterprise. In this part, we provide an overview of the BTP architecture and its transformative capabilities, focusing on key components such as the SAP HANA Vector Engine, SAP GenAI Hub and Cloud Foundry.
Architectural overview of the BTP
The SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) is a comprehensive suite of tools and services designed to help companies achieve greater flexibility, innovation and intelligence. At its core, BTP seamlessly integrates various components to provide a unified platform for application development, deployment and management. Leveraging the power of SAP HANA Vector Engine, SAP GenAI Hub and Cloud Foundry, BTP provides retailers with a solid foundation for AI-driven insights and personalized experiences. Below is an architecture overview showing the individual components of an AI Store Assistant mentioned above
Let's take a closer look at the individual components and highlight their capabilities to enable AI innovation
SAP HANA Vector Engine
At the heart of BTP's AI capabilities is the SAP HANA Vector Engine, a high-performance database optimized for processing vector-based operations. In the context of retail, the SAP HANA Vector Engine serves as a powerhouse for storing embeddings and enables fast and efficient retrieval of relevant data. By using this engine, retailers can seamlessly access and analyze volumes of data understandable to Large Language Models (LLMs), leading to predictive insights and personalized interactions. More information about the SAP HANA Vector Engine can be found here.
SAP GenAI Hub
The SAP HANA Vector Engine is complemented by the SAP GenAI Hub, a comprehensive platform for the development and deployment of LLM-based AI models. With the GenAI Hub, retailers can access a variety of pre-trained language models and customize them to their specific requirements. With this feature, retailers can send prompts to various Large Language Models (such as GPT-4 by Azure OpenAI or OpenSource Falcon-40b) and use their advanced natural language processing capabilities to generate contextualized responses. The GenAI Hub can be deployed as part of the SAP AI Core. Further information can be found here.
Cloud Foundry
To bring these capabilities to life, BTP leverages the power of Cloud Foundry, an open source platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment. By deploying Python-based applications on Cloud Foundry, retailers can quickly develop and deploy AI-driven solutions. As an example, the use of Python frameworks such as Flask (web framework) and LangChain (AI framework) helps to quickly deploy scalable AI applications. In addition, Cloud Foundry provides retailers with the flexibility and scalability they need to adapt to changing business requirements.
Example: AI Store Assistant
To illustrate this architecture in practice, we look at the AI Store Assistant - a revolutionary tool and proof-of-concept for improving operational activities in a store. The AI Store Assistant utilizes BTP's AI capabilities and integrates seamlessly with SAP S/4HANA and Industry Cloud (such as Omnichannel Promotion Pricing Service- OPPS) solutions to retrieve relevant data. Based on prompts generated by the SAP GenAI Hub, the AI Store Assistant can obtain information, make suggestions and ultimately perform these as follow-up actions. In the example below, a prediction can be made for certain product groups or actions can be created for expiring goods. The AI Store Assistant also has the option of providing charts and tables in addition to text.
Conclusion
In summary, SAP Business Technology Platform is redefining retail intelligence by leveraging advanced AI capabilities to predict, personalize and prosper. Through the seamless integration of SAP HANA Vector Engine, SAP GenAI Hub and Cloud Foundry, the BTP enables retailers to gain new insights and innovation. As we move into the future of retail, let's continue to harness the transformative power of BTP to create personalized and impactful experiences for customers worldwide. Join us on this journey of innovation and discovery as we shape the future of retail intelligence together.
- SAP Managed Tags:
