SAP says its AI assistant can cut book closing time by up to 68%. Its release skips how controllers check it.
SAP presented the Financial Consolidation Assistant at its TechEd developer conference in Berlin this week, one of 40 assistants and 300 agents it announced with partners, the SAP News Center reported.
The release names no customer and no starting point for the 68% figure. It gives no price or availability date either. "Up to" is SAP's own wording.
"For these tasks, an answer that is 'probable' is just not good enough," said Manoj Swaminathan, who runs SAP's Autonomous Suite products. "You need the right answer, every single time."
Oracle NetSuite is going after the month-end close too. The German IT weekly Computerwoche reported that its "Autonomous Close" is meant to replace the month-end rush with checks on the accounts that run all month.
The close means reconciling every group company and removing the deals they did with each other, then signing off the group numbers before the CFO and the auditors see them. Our reading: an assistant that prepares those numbers shifts the controller's hours from preparation to checking. The controller still signs.
Sources
Our file on SAP
- 2 Nov
SAP and Databricks announced a way to use SAP data without copying it out. Neither said when it ships or its price.
- 2 Nov
SAP says more than 18,000 people work for it in India, its second-largest location. Teams there help build Joule, SAP's AI assistant.
- 2 Nov
Erasmus University's move from SAP to Oracle is 70% over budget, at €20.2m. A one-year delay cost €4.5m of that.
- 1 Nov
SAP introduced a tool flagging AI agents that may be high-risk in the EU. EU fines for breaches reach 3% of turnover.
- 1 Nov
SAP paid about €518 million for AI start-up Prior Labs. Last quarter it added less than €1 million to SAP's sales.
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
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