SAP plans to bolster its retail offerings with two new tools: a refreshed loyalty management cloud and a generative AI assistant for both retailers and their customers.
The releases — along with S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition for retail, fashion and vertical business — will be shown in conjunction with the National Retail Federation’s NRF 2025: Retail’s Big Show on Jan. 12-14. The retail ERP cloud is available now, and the GenAI shopping assistant is planned for release in the first half of 2025. The loyalty program will launch during the second half of the year.
Loyalty programs are popular among retailers, said Michael Klein, founder of retail consultancy Klein4Retail. The question is, can SAP execute its loyalty management automation well enough to persuade retailers to use it? SAP’s ability to make it standalone would also make the product more appealing, he added.
“Nobody is waiting around, frankly, for somebody to come along and give them another platform that’s going to be the Swiss Army knife that does everything,” Klein said. “The reality is that [retailers have] had to bolt things together for many years. It is a huge undertaking, depending on the organization and the appetite to rip and replace, to put in a monolith platform. The other question, then, is how compartmentalized or modular is this?”
AI shopping assistant in the works
The shopping assistant is based on SAP’s Joule generative AI assistant that the company has been rolling out for HR, finance, supply chain, procurement and customer experience. It will be delivered as part of the SAP CX AI Toolkit later this year.
SAP follows a number of companies including Amazon, Salesforce and Perplexity in releasing a shopping assistant to deliver buying recommendations to employees at retail stores or directly to customers in an effort to drive sales.
The generative AI behind shopping assistants takes input with natural language processing and puts a fresh twist on product-finder apps, which in theory finds more products, makes more accurate recommendations and helps close sales.
“I can ask, ‘Give me product recommendations for things in my size,’ or ‘What would pair well with the shoes I just bought or this particular dress that’s on promotion?'” said Kristin Howell, SAP global vice president for retail solution management.
“Conversational commerce” — using inventory and ordering systems with natural language, either on a keyboard or with voice — is coming into its own, Klein said. He added that Amazon innovated the idea of conversational commerce with Echo devices in 2014, but its fledgling devices did not yield a great user experience. Flash forward 10 years, and consumers use generative AI tools like ChatGPT to locate the best deals on things they want to buy, so retailers will need to keep up with their own GenAI-based tools.
SAP will continue to invest in voice channel tools for retailers, Howell said. Being able to speak a search and get intelligent, accurate results from GenAI saves crucial time not only for customers in a hurry, but especially for employees working store floors who need help finding items, or employees in warehouses picking and packing orders.
“I think about a lot of retail jobs that are not hands-free,” she said. “For example, I’m in a warehouse trying to pick, pack and ship an order. The time it takes me to look at a mobile device — I’ve got to look it up, and then I’ve got to find the thing — being able to just say into a headset, ‘Find item 123,’ and have it respond, ‘Go to this rack. Pick it here on shelf 3’ … those are voice activations that can impact business.”
Don Fluckinger is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget. He covers customer experience, digital experience management and end-user computing. Got a tip? Email him.
