The power of artificial intelligence is showing us what the prescriptive future of computer systems should look like.
This Diffuse The Rest algorithm lets you scribble a picture, add a description, and it paints what you imagined. I’m just about to get on a plane to Dubai for a partner conference, so I quickly scribbled what I imagined my arrival might look like, and added a description. It came up with several variations, I chose my favorite, and I could have further refined it
And I used the same techniques to create the “one click innovation” image at the top of this article, with some manual tweaks.
Now we just need to do the same thing for our computer systems. During an executive Q&A at SAP TechEd last week, a customer asked if we could “just scan my system for anywhere I’ve been using custom code and tell me if there’s now a better, standard way of doing it in S/4HANA“. The answer is yes, you can get to the answer — but it’s a process that is currently full of manual steps. And of course, the system shouldn’t just be able to only identify the opportunities—it should be able to install those new best practices for you at the press of a button.
The future should be more like the sketches above—I should be able to paint a crude picture of what I want my systems to look like, and the algorithms should show me a selection of the best options, and then let me refine the final solution.
We have diagnosis tools like SAP Signavio. We have best practices and benchmarks. We have out-of-the-box content and extension solutions available as part of the ecosystem. We should be able to implement innovation directly into today’s cloud environments.
I’m looking forward to the future of “one-click innovation”!