Black box AI isn’t enough: Why enterprise consulting is moving to grounded models

Presented by SAPIn an era where anyone can spin up an LLM, the real differentiator isn’t the AI technology itself, but the institutional knowledge it’s grounded in. Internal and partner consultants leading operational transformation can’t risk hallucinated guidance when their recommendations impact integrated processes across supply chain, manufacturing, finance, and other core functions. “Grounded AI is non-negotiable, because accuracy isn’t optional when we’re doing million-dollar transformation projects within the SAP ecosystem, for example,” says Natalie Han, VP and chief product officer, gen AI at SAP Business AI. “Retrieval-augmented generation technology, and the ability to anchor responses in trusted enterprise knowledge, helps ensure accurate code interpretation, best-practice guidance, and clean-core decision support. It’s how we bring real trust into AI-powered consulting.”A fully grounded AI assistant like SAP Joule for Consultants has tremendous value in production use cases, she adds. SAP Joule has terabytes of institutional data that’s continuously curated and updated, so a consultant is assured they’re getting up-to-the-minute SAP best practices and methodologies when relying on Joule, while at the same time accelerating project delivery. “We’re saving rework time by 14%, and saving consultants 1.5 hours per day per user, which is huge when you consider how expensive consultants are now,” Han says. “Early adopters like Wipro have estimated they’ve saved 7 million hours on a manual basis for their consultants.”The foundation of SAP JouleSAP Joule is as certified as any consultant, says Sachin Kaura, chief architect, SAP Business AI. The tool was born in 2023, when GPTs famously passed a simulated bar exam and ignited buzz around the ability of LLMs to handle large amounts of context. It is widely acknowledged that the SAP ecosystem, along with its associated domain ontology and taxonomy, is incredibly vast and can be very complex to navigate. The question became, how could an AI co-pilot be used to navigate that complexity when it was actually grounded within the SAP ecosystem itself? Sachin Kaura began experimenting with frontier LLM models by putting them through the same certification exams SAP consultants take. The early results were poor, but after extensive context tuning and a focus on delivering value to the partner ecosystem, Joule now consistently scores 95% or higher.”Not only were we testing from a data perspective, but we were able to work with all of our consultants to get what we call the golden data set,” Han added. “It’s non-deterministic, language-based, and thoroughly grounded in human consultant expertise. We partnered with the whole consulting organization to manually label the golden data set across all of the products. That’s become the foundation for everything we do even now.”A state-of-the-art indexing pipelineJoule for Consultants stays up-to-date in real time. A state-of-the-art indexing pipeline pushes new SAP documentation and release content into the model as soon as it’s published, giving consultants confidence that every answer reflects the most current guidance.”This is pure engineering work done by our data scientists and engineers, using a lot of underlying SAP technology,” Kaura explains. “We leverage the SAP business foundation layer, document grounding services, and a lot of purpose-built systems to stay on top of current events in the system.”SAP Business AI also has board-level alignment, ensuring this isn’t just a one-team effort but a company-wide priority. They’ve built strong internal partnerships with content owners across SAP — including SAP Learning, SAP Community, SAP Help, product teams, and consultant teams. Together, they continuously update proprietary content such as SAP Notes, Knowledge Base Articles (KBAs), and other domain-specific guidance that reflects SAP’s evolving best practices.All of this means Joule for Consultants can take that continuously refreshed data and deliver answers in near real time. It’s the kind of research that would otherwise take a consultant hours. But information pulled directly from the source gives consultants the most current and authoritative guidance available, helping eliminate the early-stage missteps that can derail a project months later when scoping wasn’t aligned with the latest capabilities.Ensuring enterprise-grade security SAP is building a product that is relevant, reliable, and responsible, Han says. As a company founded in Europe, it takes data privacy seriously, adhering to the GDPR and other EU company regulations. At the core of SAP Business AI is the AI Foundation, the AI operating system that governs AI with built-in security, ethics, and orchestration, using automation and intelligence to manage lifecycles, optimize resources, and boost resilience.All the LLMs SAP and its customers use operate within the AI foundation, which protects private and proprietary data from being leaked. Beyond data protection, SAP treats bias, ethics, and security at an enterprise level as well, with humans in the loop to run checks and balances.”We have an enterprise-grade security framework as well as prompt injection and guardrail testing,” Kaura says. “The orchestration layer, built within the AI Foundation, anonymizes inputs as well as moderates them to prevent malicious content. That ensures that the output we give to our customers is relevant to the SAP ecosystem, relevant to the domain they’re asking about, and not just generic LLM excess. This set of tools, from the framework layer to the application layer to the product standards, and also the very thorough testing is critical to securing our product. Then and only then can it reach our customers and partners.”Pushing the limits of Joule for Consultants”We’re barely scratching the surface of what LLMs and agentic AI can offer,” Han says. “Accessing knowledge is just the beginning. We’re going to have a much deeper understanding of customers’ SAP systems and be able to help them implement and transform their journey. The product team and our engineers are working to make the tool more transformative, able to unearth more insights, connect with customers’ systems, and understand and optimize their processes, including generating code and handling customer code migration.” The next step is adding a second layer of grounding. SAP’s customer base is vast, and its partner ecosystem has implemented countless business scenarios. Grounding Joule in SAP’s institutional knowledge was the first milestone; the next is layering in each customer’s own proprietary context — historical system data, process designs, implementation blueprints, and internal documentation. This turns Joule from SAP-aware to customer-aware, delivering guidance that aligns with how a business actually operates.“Think of it as grounding your knowledge on top of SAP knowledge — giving you more accurate and relevant guidance,” Kaura says. “Information that might otherwise be lost can sit on top of Joule for Consultants. Our system processes it and ensures it comes to you in the right manner and at the right time.”This expanded grounding also lets Joule adjust its guidance to the consultant’s role — whether they’re working as an architect, a functional consultant, or a technical consultant.”We deliver the information they need for a particular customer configuration,” Han explains. “Then we can not only answer generic questions, but we can answer their particular configuration. From there it’s one step ahead to generating more insights and taking more actions.”Sponsored articles are content produced by a company that is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they’re always clearly marked. For more information, contact sales@venturebeat.com.