Integrate Chatbots Into SAP Products: What We Announced At TechEd

As announced at SAP TechEd this year, the October release of the SAP Conversational AI platform provides all the tools necessary to build powerful enterprise-ready chatbots faster than ever, enabling users to transform the experience of their customers and employees alike.

In close collaboration with customers from different industries across the globe, we discovered that teams working on chatbot projects usually spend half their time integrating the bot into their environment. And that’s clearly too much.
Our goal was to minimize this effort, allowing teams to cut the overall time spent on projects by 20–30%. These newly released features enable this by supporting the following:

Time savings for developers building chatbots, especially when it comes to integration
A smooth and consistent UX across SAP products during chats
Considerably reduced maintenance effort for developers since there’s no longer any code to maintain
Automatic end-user authentication, without asking for credentials

Let’s take a deep dive into our new features.

Connect to Your Business Systems with the New API Service Consumption

Remember the middleware you were struggling to code and put in place to connect your chatbot to back-end SAP systems? Well, now you can forget about it – with our new API Service consumption, it’s no longer needed.

SAP Conversational AI is native to your existing SAP portfolio. And that means we know better than anyone how to connect a chatbot built with SAP Conversational AI to any existing SAP environment.

During a conversation, you most likely want to retrieve business information or connect to an external system to perform actions. The new CONSUME API SERVICE action gives you greater flexibility in retrieving and using data from API service responses (JSON objects), for more straightforward integration. You can use SAP Cloud Platform destinations to easily connect bots to SAP services and efficiently manage your API service response directly on our platform.

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Enable Seamless End-User Authentication of Chatbots to any Enterprise Software with Single Sign-On (SSO)

No more password headaches for developers and project managers – thanks to Single Sign-On (SSO). SSO permits users to use a set of login credentials to access the SAP Conversational AI Web Client. Once authenticated, you can interact with your chatbot without providing your credentials at each logon.

SSO eliminates the need for multiple passwords and user IDs, lowers the risks of unsecured login information, alleviates password fatigue due to different username and password combinations, and reduces customer time spent re-entering passwords for the same identity.

By automatically recognizing the identity of the end-user, the chatbot can also deliver a more personalized and smoother user experience.

Discover how to use SSO for your chatbots with this tutorial.

Note: For now, SSO access to the SAP Conversational AI Web Client is available only for enterprise users of SAP products (such as SAP S/4HANA, SAP SuccessFactors).

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Introducing a New Web Client for SAP Conversational AI

You can now deliver a consistent conversational UX across all SAP products and save time by integrating the SAP Conversational AI Web Client with your web solution based on SAP Cloud Platform – and all this with no need for coding. The SAP Conversational AI Web Client is a conversational user interface for connecting to SAP Conversational AI chatbots via the SAP Conversational AI Web Client channel.

This new, rich web client adheres to the SAP Fiori Design Guidelines and respects enterprise product standards. It is easily configurable and supports standard functionalities of SAP Conversational AI, such as rich messaging. It reuses the authentication of the embedding platform to provide a single sign-on experience.

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Here’s a short video explaining how these features work together to help you save time.