Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping the landscape of product development, offering new ways to streamline processes, enhance collaboration, and drive innovation. Here’s how AI is making a tangible impact across the product development lifecycle:
Optimizing Requirements Descriptions with SAP Business AI
AI-powered text generation tools are simplifying the creation of descriptions for the requirements model. When users create requirements in the Requirements Management and Systems Modeling app, SAP GenAI in IPD helps them improve the descriptions for their requirements in two ways: SAP GenAI can
The outcome? Requirements are described more quickly, precisely, and concisely, enabling users to gain a clearer understanding and facilitating more effective requirements management.
Smarter Access to Product Documentation
Managing and accessing product documentation is often a bottleneck. SAP’s AI Copilot Joule offers conversational access to product documentation, enabling quick and efficient information searches. It summarizes search results and provides links to relevant topics, saving time for administrators and end-users. Simplified access to documentation keeps teams informed and supports better decision-making throughout the product development lifecycle. This ensures that all stakeholders have the necessary knowledge to perform their roles effectively, leading to smoother and more efficient product development processes.
Digitizing Legacy Assets
In industries reliant on legacy documents and drawings, AI is a game-changer. AI-driven tools can digitize old PDF drawings, convert them into accessible digital formats, and enrich them with business data and standardized naming conventions. This ensures that critical information is always available, reduces downtime, and improves maintenance processes. By transforming paper-based assets into digital resources, organizations preserve valuable knowledge and foster better collaboration.
AI Enhancements in Document Summarization
AI's role in industrial settings extends to document summarization, crucial for product development involving collaboration among design partners and suppliers. These stakeholders share numerous documents like PDF drawings and engineering designs, and quickly finding relevant information is a challenge. Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate concise summaries of uploaded documents, saving research and development teams valuable time.
Using Joule, large documents can be easily summarized into shorter, more digestible sections. If needed, you can ask Joule to further refine the query result.
Sounds Good? We will not stop there
AI-Assisted Product Specification Search
Another AI feature that we will deliver in Q1 of 2026 is the AI-assisted product specification search: Product specifications are key to managing product data in a compliant, structured and well documented fashion, be it for discrete products or process industries and food products. The data stored in product specifications goes beyond ERP data sets, including data sets for physical, chemical, analytical product compositions as well as compliant, regulated or generic product data sets. All these data sets are highly configurable and individual per customer. Depending on the size of the organization, a company may have thousands or even millions of specifications stored in its systems. The sheer volume of these specifications can make it challenging for individuals to find specifications which might need compliance or regulated changes, often turning what should be a simple search into a time-consuming task. Traditional search methods require exact property or attribute definitions which need to be matched correctly depending on the appropriate use case. This can be very time-consuming when dealing with complex properties and thousands of data sets that may be described in various ways across different documents. The use of AI can advance product specification searches tremendously. With the help of SAP Business AI search, users can query specifications in natural language, eliminating the need to understand intricate field names and parameters. This intuitive search capability quickly filters relevant specifications, providing necessary information without traditional search hassles – a quality that proves particularly useful for new or unfamiliar users. The LLM-powered search combines contextual understanding, semantic search capabilities, synonym recognition and contextual filtering, all based on natural language queries.
Grounding the search on customer data, the use of AI searches can ensure even more meaningful results that are highly relevant for your specific business use cases.
The Road Ahead
Integrating AI into product development is more than a technological upgrade—it’s a strategic move toward operational excellence. By streamlining ideation, documentation, navigation, and asset digitization, AI empowers businesses to innovate faster and respond more effectively to market demands. As AI technology continues to evolve, its role in product development will only expand, offering new opportunities for efficiency, innovation, and growth
For more details on how artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities can be leveraged to improve the product development process in SAP Integrated Product Development (IPD), check out the related Meet the Expert session.
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