Bringing Machine Learning into Practice

SAP Chief Innovation Officer Juergen Mueller at the SAP TechEd, held last month in Barcelona: “SAP has a clear way to deliver business value with machine learning”. Machine learning prototypes demonstrated at SAPPHIRE NOW in May, available as applications in 2017, are one of those ongoing initiatives which prove that the outlined strategy is actually put into practice. This initial set of application will cover time-consuming problems in the following areas:

• Accounts Receivable: matching incoming payments by learning from accountants’ past actions, and automatically processing future payments on their behalf.
• Detecting logos in high-definition video: this new technology, called computer vision, lets brand owners understand the ROI for advertising spend more quickly and precisely - by identifying where and when branded material appears in televised events.
• Customer Service: by classifying and clustering tickets as well as evaluating historical activities, system can learn how to propose solutions and accelerate response times.

Machine learning enables computers to learn from large amounts of data without being explicitly programmed to do so. Machine learning gives rise to new intelligent applications, from self-driving cars to intelligent assistants on smartphones. With the analytical capabilities of HANA database, SAP has a lot to offer in this area by leveraging existing programming models (R and Python), used so far primarily in the SAP Predictive Analytics and data mining solutions.