This Ramble is one of a series on Deshoring - the deliberate replacement of costly consulting and systems integration services with Agentic AI
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For a few months now we've been demonstrating our Agentic SAP Architect S4SensAI to customers ahead of its launch. We started with friendly faces before venturing out to the more cynical to ensure that we'd got the messaging right.
When you're entering into "new category" territory, it can be hard. You're describing something that your potential customers don't have a frame of reference for.
One of my favourite stories on positioning relates to Hollywood movie pitches, where the screenwriter has a few sentences to excite producers about what is likely to be a 2-hour long film. A lot rides on distilling the movie down into two sentences that gift wrap such an emotive and complex heavy parcel.
Possibly apocryphal, the fastest and slickest Hollywood pitch was for the original Alien movie.
Three words: Jaws in space.
We toyed with a lot of ways to land S4SensAI so that customers get it, because it's very different to the way the SAP consulting industry has worked for 30 years. Customers are used to hiring people and paying them on day rates.
S4SensAI is an AI Agent. But it needed an identity and a personality to cut through and land.
And, although it's sold on a subscription basis, we even convert the cost to a day-rate-equivalent. Instead of paying $1,500 per day for an experienced SAP consultant, you can pay just $70 per day for an agentic consultant.
S4SensAI costs just $70 per day.
I stole this from James Watt, who made transformative improvements to the Steam Engine before selling his machines to tin miners in Cornwall. Traditionally, they used horses to power the pumps that drained their tin mines when they were flooded. Watt explained his steam powered pump and they didn't get it.
"We use horses - they work fine."
Brilliantly, Watt explained that his machines were the same power as 5 horses. Horses you don't have to feed, tend to or buy. Horses that don't sleep and can work continuously. Watt created Horsepower as the unit of measure for machines. This landed the new "category" of automation in the world that his customers understood.
Watt also made up the numbers and exaggerated the power of his machines to be more horses than their real-world equivalent. Clearly before the advertising ombudsman.
So, giving S4SensAI an identity and equivalent rate means we're talking the same language as SAP customers who've been spending hundreds of thousands on consultants and contractors for decades.
Next up: questions and objections.
Security is obviously one. But we baked that into the architecture and it's a simple one to cover off with a short document.
Then comparisons. I can just use ChatGPT or Microsoft Co-Pilot and ask it questions. Sure, you can. Just like I could ask my Uber driver to fix a Rotator Cuff injury. This one proves a little more challenging because most people only have a superficial knowledge of how AI works and think that all AI tools are broadly the same.
Co-Pilot is like the modern-day MS Office Paperclip. It's a Microsoft Office integration wrapper that runs on one of the big foundation models underneath. But it really isn't designed for deep, specialised enterprise use cases in the way S4SensAI is.
Ultimately though, it just takes a side-by-side bake-off where we ask ChatGPT or Co-Pilot the same questions and get much richer and more comprehensive answers. S4SensAI is built on our own GraphDB powered Vector Database that has specialised curated S/4HANA knowledge. It simply knows more than a generic LLM the same way your shoulder surgeon knows more than your Uber driver.
How about Joule for Consultants? It's been trained on SAP's own content so has pretty one-dimensional technical knowledge. Same again, do a bake off between the two and you find that S4SensAI gives better, more rounded responses. Plus, because it has 3 sub-agents, a Project Manager, a Business Case Analyst and a Dev Lead, it can do much, much more.
A final objection we get doesn't come from the people who've been on the demo and really want it, but by their internal AI Experts who have seemingly asked AI what they should ask when buying AI.
We get a lot of questions about hallucinations. AI experts are worried about the agent giving answers that aren't quite correct, aren't fully rounded or have contradictions.
"How can we be sure S4SensAI is telling us the right answer…?"
The first time I was asked this, I was really puzzled. So I responded to the question with another question…
"How do you check that the advice your Systems Integrators and Contractors are telling you is the right answer….?"
Their response...
"I guess we don't."
This is where one of the 6 Principles of Deshoring comes in, Principle 2: Breadth of Knowledge over Narrow-Band Experience.
Every consultant you've ever worked with has a narrow band of experience. They've worked on a series of projects over a number of years. They built their knowledge based on the unique challenges that each project presented. They were randomly funnelled through a series of problems to solve, and their experience was defined by what they overcame.
10 consultants together on a project will each have their own pathways of challenges, building up a unique set of synapses connected in a unique way.
Bring these 10 people together to solve your problems and they offer a unique web of experience that no other 10 people have. Each person has their own narrow-band of experience and these are randomly overlaid to give you a team with a slightly broader but narrowly constrained experience base.
When you Deshore, you invite Agents into your project.
These Agents haven't done any projects.
Their knowledge isn't constrained by what they've done before they arrived in your reception or filled out an onboarding form for a Single-Sign-On account.
No. Their experience is based on a huge corpus of information that they can recall based on the questions you ask. It isn't constrained. These Agents aren't simply specialised; they are specialised and unconstrained.
You see, the human consultants could ostensibly access all of the knowledge that the Agents have. But they'll always revert to "in my experience…." or "on my last project…." or "when I was at <<IMPRESSIVE CLIENT NAME>> what we did was…"
Does this mean we don't need humans?
No way.
We need experienced people to nuance, interpret and navigate the last mile. But valuing breadth of knowledge over narrow band experience means that you suddenly access different options, realistic alternatives, tangential ideas, untrodden paths.
And you access them in minutes, not days and weeks.
Where previously you were on the clock for 10 days at $1,500 per day, the cost of a small family car, with Deshoring you get a better answer for $10 (the cost of a visit to Starbucks).
Am I saying kick out all of your SI Consultants and SAP Contractors?
No. I'm not.
But you can kick out half of them.
The crap ones.
Deshoring: Faster, Cheaper, Better. SAP delivery.