Presented by SAPWhen SAP ran a quiet internal experiment to gauge consultant attitudes toward AI, the results were striking. Five teams were asked to validate answers to more than 1,000 business requirements completed by SAP’s AI co-pilot, Joule for Consultants — a workload that would normally take several weeks.Four teams were told the analysis had been completed by junior interns fresh out of school. They reviewed the material, found it impressive, and rated the work about 95% accurate.The fifth team was told the very same answers had come from AI.They rejected almost everything.Only when asked to validate each answer one by one did they discover that the AI was, in fact, highly accurate — surfacing detailed insights the consultants had initially dismissed. The overall accuracy? Again, about 95%.“The lesson learned here is that we need to be very cautious as we introduce AI — especially in how we communicate with senior consultants about its possibilities and how to integrate it into their workflows,” says Guillermo B. Vazquez Mendez, chief architect, RI business transformation and architecture, SAP America Inc.The experiment has since become a revealing starting point for SAP’s push toward the consultant of 2030: a practitioner who is deeply human, enabled by AI, and no longer weighed down by the technical grunt work of the past.Overcoming AI skepticismResistance isn’t surprising, Vazquez notes. Consultants with two or three decades of experience carry enormous institutional knowledge — and an understandable degree of caution.But AI copilots like Joule for Consultants are not replacing expertise. They’re amplifying it.“What Joule really does is make their very expensive time …
