AI and machine learning are breathing new life and business opportunities into that tired old phrase, "automating paper-based processes." I saw an example of how software developers can inject intelligence into business processes in this VIDEO interview at SAP TechEd with Dr. Matthias Sessler, technical enablement lead, SAP Leonardo Machine Learning Foundation. The demo showed image object detection combined with scene text recognition and optical character recognition (OCR), three of the 23 ready-to-use services on offer from the SAP Leonardo Machine Learning Foundation. Image object detection automatically identifies objects from images like a bus, and often tag teams with scene text recognition, which reads the fine print, such as the station name and line number. "With smartphones, it's so much easier for people to take a picture of something. However, developers need a toolbox so they can quickly build machine learning capabilities to make sense of these images and text," said Sessler.

AI and machine learning are breathing new life and business opportunities into that tired old phrase, "automating paper-based processes." I saw an example of how software developers can inject intelligence into business processes in this VIDEO interview at SAP TechEd with Dr. Matthias Sessler, technical enablement lead, SAP Leonardo Machine Learning Foundation. The demo showed image object detection combined with scene text recognition and optical character recognition (OCR), three of the 23 ready-to-use services on offer from the SAP Leonardo Machine Learning Foundation. Image object detection automatically identifies objects from images like a bus, and often tag teams with scene text recognition, which reads the fine print, such as the station name and line number. "With smartphones, it's so much easier for people to take a picture of something. However, developers need a toolbox so they can quickly build machine learning capabilities to make sense of these images and text," said Sessler.

At SAPPHIRE NOW last year, SAP launched SAP Leonardo Machine Learning. One year later, machine learning has made another great step forward and is about to become pervasive in enterprise software. To facilitate the fast and simple adoption of machine intelligence in the enterprise, SAP just announced a wide spectrum of new capabilities intended to provide intelligent solutions for an even broader variety of business challenges. Conversation is the future interface for business. That's a trend proven by the global success of messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Kik, Telegramm, and more.

In recent years, SAP has been harnessing machine learning in its applications, which unites human expertise and computer insights. SAP is launching its own machine learning on a digital platform that is known as the SAP Leonardo Machine Learning Foundation, which provides an enterprise-grade platform for machine learning in the cloud. SAP Leonardo is a digital innovation system that delivers software and microservices that enables customers to leverage new technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning, analytics, blockchain and Big Data. SAP Leonardo was inspired by Renaissance painter, architect, engineer and philosopher Leonardo da Vinci. Markus Noga, SAP's Head of Machine Learning, told me that SAP Leonardo was introduced on January 11, 2017 and was extended to include SAP's entire digitization efforts with a machine learning foundation at SAP's SAPPHIRE event in May of 2017.

In May this year, SAP launched the SAP Leonardo Machine Learning portfolio at SAPPHIRE NOW in Orlando, Florida and thus demonstrated that it's on the pulse of innovation. Today, it is about time to sum up the latest developments and give an outlook on the potential of intelligent technologies. Deep learning, neural networks, and natural language processing elevated machine learning to new levels. Thanks to mature machine learning algorithms, higher processing power, and the availability of huge data sets, machines are becoming intelligent and able to process unstructured data like pictures, text, or spoken language – often even on a superhuman level. Additionally, deep learning is now stable enough to potentially establish machine learning as a standard commodity across businesses worldwide.

To execute on such a bold vision, SAP delivers an expanding portfolio of application and services that help all companies embed machine learning into their business processes. But to pave an optimal path forward for these businesses, SAP is committed to establishing an ecosystem of leaders with a variety of domain expertise in order to complement and expand its offerings. This collaboration is essential to enable customers to make a smooth transition to the intelligent enterprise. Opportunities to partner with SAP on machine learning are manifold, and so are the use cases customers are currently exploring as they inject intelligence into their value chains. To facilitate a close collaboration with partners and generate mutual value, SAP has created a machine learning partner program, which runs as an overlay to existing partner programs offered through SAP PartnerEdge.

When launching SAP Leonardo Machine Learning Foundation, SAP started on a mission to overcome these challenges and help all customers transition to the intelligent enterprise, no matter their level of digital maturity and AI expertise. Now, SAP expands the capabilities of its machine learning platform, including the training of image classification services with training data belonging to the customer, the opportunity for customers to deploy their own models on SAP Leonardo Machine Learning Foundation, and new ready-to-use services. To help customers and partners address a larger number of use cases, SAP has opened the enterprise-class model training capability of SAP Leonardo Machine Learning Foundation. It is now possible for customer to tailor services to their business needs by training services on their unique data. This new functionality is enabled via a secure extraction of data via SAP Cloud Platform and predefined training routines.

In the business world, partnerships on an equal footing like these are part of the key to success in competitive and fast-moving environments. They bring access to expertise, more effective products and services, and greater potential for innovation and stability. Earlier this year, SAP and NVIDIA expanded their collaboration to create business applications based on artificial intelligence. Now, as NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference kicks off in Munich, Germany, the partnership has gained even further substance. SAP installed its first NVIDIA DGX-1 systems – the world's first AI supercomputer – in Israel and Potsdam in 2016.

Today, SAP has announced three initiatives that expand and accelerate our machine learning capabilities. First, we are launching SAP Leonardo Machine Learning, an exciting new offering that embeds machine learning into a new wave of applications. Second, we are opening our SAP Leonardo Machine Learning Foundation to the SAP ecosystem via SAP Cloud Platform. And third, SAP has joined the Partnership on AI, a broad collaboration of commercial and non-profit organizations to benefit people and society. SAP Leonardo Machine Learning is part of the new SAP Leonardo portfolio, which combines machine learning, Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, analytics, Big Data, and data intelligence into a holistic digital innovation system allowing our customers to innovate at scale and redefine their business.