#73: SAP Business AI, ABAP in 2025, Cogna
In this issue:
I Will Take One SAP Business AI To Go, Please
The "SAP Business AI" page shows up as part of the "All Products" list on the SAP website. But don't be fooled: SAP Business AI is not a product. I think SAP Business AI is what happens when you have a hodgepodge of AI and quasi-AI features that have accumulated into your product portfolio, and you want a sticky name that people can remember.
I'm not saying that SAP doesn't have AI in its products - of course it does. There are data science and machine learning-ish features like forecasting in SAP Intelligent Agriculture. There are (lots of) generative AI features enabling things like SAP Emarsys Customer Engagement. These are just a few of many.
But if you want to actually find out where AI meets up with products relevant to your business, you should ignore the SAP Business AI page. Instead, go to the Discovery Center AI catalog, pick the relevant thing in the "Products" drop-down, and click the tiles to get a very nice info view. Many of them even have pricing information! If you're a techno-dork, follow a similar path to the SAP BTP services page, and search for "AI Enabled". Same deal: click the tiles to find out more. The information is pretty good.
Maybe someday we'll get to a point where all software is assumed to have AI suffused throughout, and we don't really need to see whether some feature uses AI. Until then, I think we're going to have to do a lot of filtering. PM
ABAP Like It’s 2025
The other day my Reddit feed surfaced a post asking for ABAP beginner advice. The OP shared that they “just finished an Sap Abap Diploma course that the last thing i've learned is a little bit of Batch Imput” (original grammar preserved) and they wanted to dive into RAP but had no idea what “ODATA, FIORI, Ui5, BTP, CDS” were.
You might chuckle or shake your head at this inquiry. If you did, I’m curious: how did you gain this knowledge?
Many ABAP veterans, like me, sort of grew into technology as we lived to see its rise and fall. We remember when there were only two different ALV frameworks. We’ve known the world before Fiori and HANA. We’ve heard about the secret projects called River and Steampunk. We got to know the OG SAP Build.
But what does ABAP (and broadly, SAP development) look like in 2025 to someone without a 20-year head start? It must feel like being air-dropped into the middle of a battlefield.
The shady “ABAP school” clearly did not prepare OP for the real world. It’s clearly not an isolated incident. There should be a global crackdown on such schools, with riot-gear-clad law enforcement door-busting—but that’s another story. Now that OP is out, they’re exposed on the world wild web like a gazelle in a lion reserve.
Google search is crap. SAP Community is a hot mess. SAP Learning website insists on including BTP in everything. Udemy is a bazaar of randos shouting in all caps, pushing “ABAP OOPS” wares with a deep dive into PF status, if you got coin. And LinkedIn is where ex-something influencers spread the good word of ground-breaking “@Odata publish Annotation”. Hashtag blessed.
It feels like between “like it’s 1999” and “Cloud everything” the current year is somehow getting lost. And what’s actually important, useful, and practical, drowns in the noise of 500 emojis. Class of 2025, I don’t envy you. JP
Fully Awesome, Fully Crazy
I spend much of my professional life in the dark corners of huge ERP systems. Creating applications for them is a huge pain. Unless you've done it, it's hard to understand the complexity of such a task - I'm kind of surprised that I've ever done a successful enterprise app. To create an ERP system feels like a superhuman task of another order altogether.
So when I hear about an audacious product like Cogna, I am simultaneously amazed and skeptical. Cogna doesn't appear to have plans to fully replicate an SAP-sized ERP, but they do claim a three-step method:
Discover: "Describe the challenges your business or team is facing and identify opportunities for improvement."
Define: "Collaborate within our platform to create the ideal tools to deliver on opportunities."
Delivered: "Our AI-powered platform will build and deploy a solution within two weeks, with the Solution Strategist available to take input, and make adjustments as needed."
Two weeks!? I need to see a demo video, because that is either to be expected because the scope is limited, or utterly insane.
This encapsulates what AI feels like to me at the moment. The idea that you can foresee something becoming possible, and that possibility feels so imminent that you just go ahead and start the project even if right now it can't be done. I'm not saying that what Cogna promises can't be done - I'm saying that thinking it could be done is a leap forward. PM
Red Flags of Doom
Does your project have more red flags than a Soviet parade? Stay in SAP game long enough and you’ll see everything Martin Coetzee listed in this post.
The “premature solutioning” is one of my favorites. Sure, we need to be realistic eventually, but stuffing the dreams into a Procrustean bed of SAP extensibility too early leads to missed opportunities.
And “Functional Consultants that design the technical solution” makes me want to borrow John Stewart’s trademark “meet me at camera 3” moment. Dear consultants, please stop writing “read from VBAK where… and LOOP” stuff in the functional specifications. It’s the developer’s job to figure out what to read from where and how. While we appreciate your technical insights, what we really need to do our job best is some context for the requirements—things like why they are needed and what goal we’re trying to achieve.
As Martin wrote, the subject of incompetence is almost taboo. In my experience, it frequently starts when someone is grabbed for a project because they’re the only one available—not because they’re the best person for the job. In the best-case scenario, the result will be underwhelming, likely due to extra effort from others. In the worst case, spectacular failures happen when the incompetent one is also the loudest. JP
Quantum Computing
In early December, Google was in the news with their new quantum chip Willow announcement. I won’t pretend to understand much about the quantum computing subject, but I like to keep my ear to the ground in case it turns into something big. There are concerns about its potential of breaking RSA encryption, which seems like a big deal. This awesome video from Fireship explains it all in under 10 minutes. Just watch it and then show off your mad knowledge and sophistication at the water cooler. You’re welcome! JP
A Long Half-Life
I was going to write a piece about the developer job situation in 2024, based on this Stack Overflow recap podcast. But I had an internet-addled-attention-span moment and got caught up in this episode, which mentions the half-life of developer skills in modern AI environments: 2 years.
2 years! And it seems reasonable to assume that that will only contract further.
I'm not making a value judgment about the half-life of those skills. It's great to write flashy new stuff. I do it all the time! I try lots of frameworks, throw away loads of little kooky prototypes, and read papers that will be irrelevant by the time I'm done reading them. I live and breathe to be on the bleeding edge.
When I imagine how much of my experimental AI framework code from 2022 is still in active use, I laugh. (None!) That ABAP I wrote from my first year doing that, in 2010? Guaranteed it's still actively running.
ABAP developers, your skills' half-life is measured in decades. That two-line user exit? There's a decent chance that's the last code that will ever execute in a corporate datacenter before the Singularity nano-swarm swallows all computers. PM
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