The AI that scored 95% — until consultants learned it was AI
Presented by SAP
When SAP conducted a quiet internal experiment to gauge consultants’ attitudes toward AI, the results were striking. Five teams were asked to validate responses 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 that the analysis had been completed by junior interns fresh out of school. They reviewed the material, found it impressive and rated the work as approximately 95% accurate.
The fifth team was told that the same answers had come from AI.
They rejected almost everything.
Only when they were asked to validate each answer one by one did they discover that the AI was in fact highly accurate, uncovering detailed insights that the consultants had initially dismissed. The overall accuracy? Again, about 95%.
“The lesson here is that we need to be very careful as we introduce AI – especially in how we communicate with senior consultants about its capabilities and how we can integrate it into their workflows,” said Guillermo B. Vazquez Mendez, principal architect, RI business transformation and architecture, SAP America Inc.
The experiment has since become a revelatory starting point for SAP’s pursuit of the consultant of 2030: a practitioner who is deeply human, powered by AI, and no longer burdened by the technical grunt work of the past.
Overcoming AI Skepticism
Resistance is not surprising, Vazquez notes. Consultants with two to three decades of experience have enormous institutional knowledge – and an understandable degree of caution.
But AI copilots like Joule for Consultants do not replace expertise. They reinforce it.
“What Joule really does is make their very expensive time much more effective,” says Vazquez. “It takes away the administrative work so they can focus on delivering high-quality answers in a fraction of the time.”
He continually emphasizes this message: “AI does not replace you. It is a tool for you. Human supervision is always required. But now, instead of spending your time looking for documentation, you save a lot of time and increase the effectiveness and detail of your answers.”
The consultant’s time shift: from technical execution to business insight
Historically, consultants spent about 80% of their time understanding technical systems: how processes flow, how data flows, how functions are executed. Customers, on the other hand, spend 80% of their time on their business.
That mismatch is exactly where Joule steps in.
“There’s a gap there – and the bridge is AI,” says Vazquez. “It flips the time equation, allowing consultants to invest more energy in understanding the client’s industry and business objectives. AI takes on the heavy technical lift, so consultants can focus on driving the right business outcomes.”
Inform new consultants
AI is also transforming the way new employees learn.
“We are happy to see Joule bridging the gap between senior consultants, who are slower to adapt, and interns and new consultants who are already tech-savvy,” says Vazquez.
Junior consultants grow faster because Joule helps them operate independently. Seniors engage where their insight is most important.
This is also where many consultants learn the basics of today’s AI copilots. Much of the work depends on rapid engineering – for example, tasking Joule to act as senior chief technology architect, specializing in finance and SAP S/4HANA 2023, and then asking him to analyze the business requirements and provide the output in the form of tables or PowerPoint slides.
Once they understand how to formulate directions, consultants consistently receive higher-quality, more structured answers.
New architects can also communicate more clearly with their more experienced counterparts. They know what they don’t know and can ask specific questions, making mentoring much smoother. It has created a real synergy, Vazquez adds: senior consultants see how quickly new hires adapt and learn with AI, and that momentum encourages them to keep up and adopt the technology themselves.
Looking ahead to the future of AI copilots
“We are still in the baby steps of AI – we are toddlers,” says Vazquez. “Right now, copilots rely on fast engineering to get good answers. The better you ask, the better the answer you get.”
But that only represents the earliest phase of what these systems will eventually do. As copilots mature, they move beyond responding to cues and begin to interpret entire business processes: understanding the sequence of steps, identifying where human intervention is needed, and seeing where an AI agent can take over. That shift leads directly to agentic AI.
SAP’s in-depth process knowledge makes this evolution possible. The company has mapped more than 3,500 business processes across industries – a repository that Vazquez calls “some of the most valuable, rigorously tested processes developed in the last 50 years.” Every day, SAP systems support approximately $7.3 trillion in global trade, giving these emerging AI agents a rich foundation to navigate and reason about.
“With that level of process insight and data, we can make a real leap forward,” he says, “by equipping our consultants with agentic AI that can solve complex challenges and push us toward increasingly autonomous systems.”
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