COOL TECH FOR UNCOOL TASKS

Complex financial operations are now ‘ made for dummies’

There was a time when technology was first at supercomputer levels before their mini versions trickled into our homes. Now, newage tools like artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning and virtual reality find their humble beginnings in our homes, before making it to the large enterprises. AI- enabled offerings have invented a new genre of technology called smart assistants. The smartphones we use everyday are powered by software that snoop around your usage patterns and intelligently suggest new apps for you. Now the enterprise side of things wants to use them for more serious applications.

SAP, the big daddy of enterprise application software is one of the first to ride this wave. A few days back, it announced the India launch of an ‘ intelligent ERP’ solution that makes serious work seem like fun! The boring old enterprise resource planning, backbone of any organisation, now comes with voice- based assistants, live chat, real- time notes... all powered by cool technologies like predictive analytics. SAP’s product — S/ 4HANA Cloud is tailor made for India and if you own a small or mid- sized company, it allows you to run it on your smartphone and pull up complex profit graphs by just talking to it. The tool constantly learns from your interactions and predicts what data you like and what you don’t. All this is thanks to an inbuilt set of features called CoPilot, which pulls out the exact information you need from your huge virtual stash of data! One of the unsolved mysteries of the taxation world — the infamous GST calculations are now a breeze with SAP. Its biggest Indian innovation is to decipher GST and embed it in the tool, ensuring that GST rates are smartly calculated in realtime, for each financial entry.

This is just one of the many possible applications of newage technologies for businesses.