Updated: December 5, 2023

Designing for Generative AI

Intro

Generative AI and other emerging AI capabilities will have a significant impact on global businesses and society in the upcoming years. SAP has responded to the opportunities and risks of this huge technological innovation with a clear strategy for SAP Business AI. We’ve made it a priority to add business value by embedding relevant, reliable, and responsible AI across our entire portfolio.

In September 2023, SAP also announced Joule, SAP’s generative AI-based co-pilot. Joule will be embedded throughout SAP’s cloud enterprise portfolio to deliver proactive and contextualized insights that span our entire solution portfolio and also integrate third-party sources.

We envision this to transform the user experience of SAP solutions massively – so that you can define the desired business outcomes, and SAP systems generate insights and optimizations by connecting the relevant business knowledge and process data. We believe that generative AI can make businesses around the world more productive, more efficient and more resilient and has the potential to delight SAP’s end users in a totally new dimension so that they can achieve more and focus on what matters most.

Furthermore, we believe that … humans continue to play a key role in the decision and reasoning processes of enterprises. Therefore, we intentionally design our AI solutions to keep humans in the loop to carefully review and approve AI-generated information.

– Rahul Lodhe, Senior Director SAP Artificial Intelligence, 07/2023 in AIM

Information
We are releasing this early version of our generative AI design guidelines to share our discoveries early on with our broader SAP and UX community. The design guidelines in this section will evolve iteratively based on research, input from the community, and feedback from stakeholders.

Coming soon:

  • Designing Safety into Generative AI
  • Designing Sustainable Generative AI Experiences
  • Designing Effective AI Prompts

Design Guidelines for Generative AI

The UI and interaction design is a crucial element of SAP’s generative AI offering. How well we guide and empower users, surface the right information at the right time, and explain our AI results will ultimately determine whether or not users trust and embrace the capabilities of generative AI.

Our Approach

The content for the generative AI design guidelines is rooted in real use cases. All of our design concepts are being co-created and continuously improved in collaboration with SAP product teams and generative AI power users.

Creating best practices for user experiences fueled by generative AI will require extensive human-centered research and design to make it valuable and enjoyable for users. Getting started is the hard part – especially for a completely unique interaction model that’s still in its infancy. With this in mind, we’re taking the following approach to creating guidelines and patterns:

  • Talk to users to understand their needs
  • Develop an informed hypothesis
  • Learn, iterate, and improve as we go

The UI and interaction design is a crucial element of SAP’s generative AI offering. How well we guide and empower users, surface the right information at the right time, and explain our AI results will ultimately determine whether or not users trust and embrace the capabilities of generative AI.

Get Started!


Check out our first set of guidelines generative AI.


Find explanations for key generative AI terms in our AI design glossary and check out helpful AI design resources.


Contact the SAP AI Design Team.