Agilent and Sutherland share how they used the SAP Discovery Center to learn about and deploy SAP Business AI solutions.
Especially in the age of AI, it can be a challenge to keep up with the rapid pace of innovation. For many companies, the biggest hurdle is figuring out where and how to start, which technologies to prioritize, what investments are needed, and whether the technologies provide real value. The SAP Discovery Center helps answer these questions.
The SAP Discovery Center is a platform where potential and existing SAP customers can explore SAP Business AI's AI solutions. Here you will find ready-made applications, content, use cases, services, reference architectures and best practices – all for free.
The self-service portal offers the opportunity not only to explore solutions, but also to get a feel for how SAP software could be used in your own company. Cost and ROI estimation tools prompt users to enter organization-specific information—such as customizations, hyperscalers, and number of users—and provide concrete, personalized use cases that can be presented within the organization. Based on a company's current platform strategy and architectural landscape, maturity assessments show users exactly what steps they should take next to evolve towards an autonomous company.
The platform also includes so-called missions – step-by-step instructions for implementing SAP solutions. These show, among other things, which solutions and services are needed, what the architecture can look like and how other customers are already achieving added value. AI has nearly 400 features and agents available for customers to explore in the SAP Business AI catalog.
At SAP Sapphire Orlando, two customers who use the SAP Discovery Center shared the added value self-service offers them and how it supports them in developing their digital transformation approach.
Agilent
Agilent is a global leader in life sciences, diagnostics and applied chemistry. The company provides laboratories with analytical instruments, software, consumables and services. To avoid manual analysis and late detection of changes in tariffs and compliance requirements, Agilent turned to the SAP Discovery Center. “One of our core principles is: Don't solve the problem that's already been solved,” said Manthan Peshne, chief enterprise architect at Agilent Technologies. Thanks to the SAP Discovery Center, Agilent has been able to stay true to this principle.
“We looked around the SAP Discovery Center and found some good building blocks – essentially in the form of missions,” reported Peshne. “We also looked at modular services that we could put together. It's not a complete solution, but we found a use case from a completely different industry that we could leverage.” Using a mission from the oil and gas industry, the Agilent team was able to discover how an AI agent interprets unstructured regulatory signals, filters out the customs context, assesses its relevance, and converts this fragmented information into concrete, actionable alerts. Agilent not only found a solution to its problem – thanks to the mission in the SAP Discovery Center, the entire project, from design thinking to development, was started and implemented much faster.
“With this solution, we not only solved a specific problem, but at the same time created a platform that can be used throughout the entire company. The whole thing is, so to speak, a building block that we can now use for other scenarios – wherever we need to capture external inputs or signals and put them in the context of Agilent data,” added Peshne.
Sutherland
Sutherland is an AI-powered digital transformation company that designs, executes and automates business processes at scale – with the goal of helping its customers achieve real, measurable business results. A significant part of this includes the development and productive deployment of Agentic AI solutions based on leading Foundation models.
The SAP Discovery Center has given Sutherland the impetus for many projects. “Instead of launching a minimal product to see what the problem is and where we should start, we have a ready-made solution to build on,” said Amar Busireddy, SAP Enterprise Architect at Sutherland Services. “Depending on the scenario, that gives us a lead of around 20 to 30 percent.”
Having a baseline builds confidence, Busireddy said, and allows Sutherland's consultants to develop solutions faster, which means faster time to value for clients. The missions in the SAP Discovery Center were particularly helpful: “We use missions to stimulate the further training of our consultants and to support our customers with implementation,” explained Busireddy. There are numerous missions around Joule – including integrating the AI solution with SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Ariba and SAP S/4HANA.
“For many problems, there are many reference architectures that may not be sufficient for us or may not meet our requirements 100 percent, but they show us what we should use and what we shouldn't. Based on this, we can plan the budget and time frame,” he emphasized.
SAP Discovery Center: The starting point
Agilent and Sutherland's experiences show that the SAP Discovery Center is more than just a knowledge platform – it is a catalyst for concrete action. With practical guidance, reusable missions, reference architectures and planning tools to assess suitability, costs and benefits, the platform enables companies to innovate faster without having to start from scratch. This makes the SAP Discovery Center the right starting point for companies that want to use AI for better business results.
