How SAP became a leader in business AI with upskilling

Whether your organization is striving to be an AI leader—or just stay on top of the technology—upskilling can help you overcome common challenges and empower your teams. 

Anderson Santana de Oliveira, Corporate Learning Expert for AI at SAP, explains how their technology organization has created a global AI learning strategy to stay ahead. 

Want all the insights? Watch the webinar.

When ChatGPT was first unveiled, SAP knew they needed to guide their teams through the AI revolution. 

Many employees were starting from level zero. They had no data experience or only basic data literacy skills. To manage, and eventually master, AI technology, they needed to take those skills to the next level.

SAP began by creating a centralized learning program. As AI evolved, different learning resources naturally sprang up throughout the organization. Anderson’s team collected those resources in one location.

“We created a partnership with the [AI unit of the] business trying to bring the most up-to-date information to people in a central place,” he says. “We created the internal site which, in about six months, got 28,000 unique viewers and 120,000 page hits. It was being referred to and announced by the leaders like, ‘Please go here to this place to upskill yourself.’”

By creating a central learning source, they streamlined upskilling, aligned departments and teams, and ensured everyone referenced the most accurate, updated information.

One of the biggest challenges of organizational upskilling is creating a scalable program that accommodates employees’ different locations and levels of expertise. 

SAP tackled this in two ways. First, they offer self-paced content that anybody can access at any time throughout the year. Second, and most notably, they provide opportunities for people from different regions and roles to get together and learn from each other.

Anderson uses SAP’s 2023 global learning event as an example. “We had an AI learning day which was global and around the clock. We started with talks from leaders and from partners and experts in AI in the morning for the EU, and it went until the night for people in the Americas.

“There were live talks interwoven with hands-on exercises [employees] could join. They could go to our internal resources to download exercises for developers. They needed to code, interact with LLMs, use APIs from SAP to access LLMs, and create small applications and chatbots using different language models. For the non-technical people, there were also prompting exercises they could do at their own pace.”

Each year, SAP has taken their learning programs to the next level. Their 2023 focus was to improve their workforce’s AI awareness. In 2024, that focus shifted to helping their employees become AI practitioners.

They created a global hackathon event to give teams hands-on experience with AI. In the first phase, they held inspiration sessions. These sessions included speakers from SAP, as well as their partners at Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Pluralsight. More than 10,000 people joined.

The second phase was the actual hackathon where employees were asked to create solutions with what they learned. SAP set up local hacking sessions across the United States, Europe, and Asia for employees to connect and work on ideas together. 2,900 people participated in this team hacking. They submitted over 730 ideas with 400 of them actually making it to implementation.

Outside of large-scale events, SAP regularly hosts smaller learning challenges. In these workshops, employees get together to solve daily challenges or complete certain activities. 

For example, they may be asked to use AI to write a blog series, create communication for employees, or produce meeting minutes from a transcript.

“We have different small challenges like this,” Anderson explained. “People get together in teams in breakout rooms and they select one challenge to work on together. This is a very successful and popular format, and we have made it a kind of permanent offer. We schedule those workshops, people join, [and] there is a lot of participation and interest.”

Lack of time is one of the top challenges of upskilling. But SAP knows helping employees carve out this time is essential to leveraging emerging technologies and overcoming challenges.  

“Give people the opportunity to take the time to understand this technology, use it day by day, [and] try to master it because that is key for them to upskill themselves and be ready for what's coming next,” said Anderson. 

For all of SAP’s insights, watch the on-demand webinar.