Presented by SAP
When SAP ran a quiet internal experiment to gauge consultant attitudes toward AI, the outcomes were striking. Five teams were asked to validate answers to greater than 1,000 business requirements accomplished by SAP’s AI co-pilot, Joule for Consultants — a workload that might normally take several weeks.
4 teams were told the evaluation had been accomplished by junior interns fresh out of college. They reviewed the fabric, found it impressive, and rated the work about 95% accurate.
The fifth team was told the exact same answers had come from AI.
They rejected almost all the things.
Only when asked to validate each answer one after the other did they discover that the AI was, in actual fact, highly accurate — surfacing detailed insights the consultants had initially dismissed. The general accuracy? Again, about 95%.
“The lesson learned here is that we have to be very cautious as we introduce AI — especially in how we communicate with senior consultants about its possibilities and learn how to integrate it into their workflows,” says Guillermo B. Vazquez Mendez, chief architect, RI business transformation and architecture, SAP America Inc.
The experiment has since turn into a revealing place to begin for SAP’s push toward the consultant of 2030: a practitioner who’s deeply human, enabled by AI, and not weighed down by the technical grunt work of the past.
Overcoming AI skepticism
Resistance isn’t surprising, Vazquez notes. Consultants with two or three many years of experience carry enormous institutional knowledge — and an comprehensible degree of caution.
But AI copilots like Joule for Consultants will not be replacing expertise. They’re amplifying it.
“What Joule really does is make their very expensive time far simpler,” Vazquez says. “It removes the clerical work, in order that they can give attention to turning out high-quality answers in a fraction of the time.”
He emphasizes this message continuously: “AI is just not replacing you. It’s a tool for you. Human oversight is at all times required. But now, as an alternative of spending your time in search of documentation, you’re gaining significant time and boosting the effectiveness and detail of your answers.”
The consultant time-shift: from tech execution to business insight
Historically, consultants spent about 80% of their time understanding technical systems — how processes run, how data flows, how functions execute. Customers, in contrast, spend 80% of their time focused on their business.
That mismatch is strictly where Joule steps in.
“There’s a niche there — and the bridge is AI,” Vazquez says. “It flips the time equation, enabling consultants to take a position more of their energy in understanding the client’s industry and business goals. AI takes on the heavy technical lift, so consultants can give attention to driving the appropriate business outcomes.”
Bringing latest consultants up to the mark
AI can be transforming how latest hires learn.
“We’re excited to see Joule acting as a bridge between senior consultants, who’re adapting more slowly, and interns and latest consultants who’re already technically savvy,” Vazquez says.
Junior consultants ramp up faster because Joule helps them operate independently. Seniors, meanwhile, engage where their insight matters most.
This can be where many consultants learn the basics of today’s AI copilots. Much of the work is dependent upon prompt engineering — as an illustration, instructing Joule to act as a senior chief technology architect specializing in finance and SAP S/4HANA 2023, then asking it to research business requirements and deliver the output as tables or PowerPoint slides.
Once they grasp learn how to frame prompts, consultants consistently get higher-quality, more structured answers.
Recent architects are also in a position to communicate more clearly with their more experienced counterparts. They know what they don’t know and might ask targeted questions, which makes mentorship far smoother. It’s created an actual synergy, Vazquez adds — senior consultants see how quickly latest hires are adapting and learning with AI, and that momentum encourages them to maintain pace and adopt the technology themselves.
Waiting for the longer term of AI copilots
“We’re still in the child steps of AI — we’re toddlers,” Vazquez says. “Immediately, copilots rely upon prompt engineering to get good answers. The higher you prompt, the higher the reply you get.”
But that represents only the earliest phase of what these systems will eventually do. As copilots mature, they’ll move beyond responding to prompts and begin interpreting entire business processes — understanding the sequence of steps, identifying where human intervention is required, and spotting where an AI agent could take over. That shift is what leads directly into agentic AI.
SAP’s depth of process knowledge is what makes that evolution possible. The corporate has mapped greater than 3,500 business processes across industries — a repository Vazquez calls “among the most respected, rigorously tested processes developed within the last 50 years.” Daily, SAP systems support roughly $7.3 trillion in global commerce, giving these emerging AI agents a wealthy foundation to navigate and reason over.
“With that level of process insight and data, we will take an actual breakthrough,” he says, “equipping our consultants with agentic AI that may solve complex challenges and push us toward increasingly autonomous systems.”
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