SAP is building seven AI agent families to help upgrade customer code. Its ABAP chief said ABAP changes are usually not undone.
ABAP is the programming language most SAP business systems run on.
Sonja Liénard, head of ABAP Platform at SAP, gave the details in an SAP News Center interview on 11 November.
SAP says the seven families it is building will cover steps of a move to a newer release, such as analysing the system, testing, and moving the programs a company wrote for itself. SAP says they can also be used on their own to check the quality of those programs.
Because a change in ABAP takes effect in the running system immediately, and a mistake is generally fixed with a further change rather than undone, Liénard said agents need an isolated test environment and strict quality checks.
SAP is also looking at agents that administer and run systems. Those should only support people and not operate in systems on their own, according to Liénard.
SAP said it plans to ship more migration tools by year end. It gave no ship date, price or customer count for the seven families.
Where the usual repair is another change, the test system and the person who signs off decide what an agent may touch.
Sources
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For your next steering committee
- 1Ask which AI tools already touch your ERP or finance data, including the ones nobody approved.
- 2Ask what each tool is allowed to change, and who reviews what it changed.
- 3Ask how the result is measured, and who decides to switch a tool off.
Issue 01 of the ERP LEADERS brief puts a timeline, the three-number review and six questions on one page. Read issue 01
Welcome back. · Issue 01
