Ask ten business owners what they want from AI and you'll rarely hear "a robot that writes poems." What they want is far more down to earth. They want to find the number they need without hunting through five reports. They want to spend less time on admin. And they want to make decisions with a bit more confidence than a gut feeling allows.
That's exactly where SAP Business One is heading with its new AI features. We've been working with SAP Business One customers in Berlin and across Europe for years, and these updates are some of the most useful we've seen. The reason is simple: they aren't about AI for its own sake. They're about helping the people who run the business get to answers faster.
An answer is only useful if it understands your business
Any AI tool can give you an answer in a few seconds. Whether that answer is any good is another matter.
Real business questions are rarely simple. "Why did sales drop in March?" might come down to one large customer pausing orders, a price increase that landed badly, or a product that kept going out of stock. To answer it properly, you need to look at your own customers, orders, stock levels and margins, not at generic internet knowledge.
SAP Business One already holds all of that in one place. What SAP has done now is connect AI to that context, so the questions you ask are grounded in the data your business actually runs on.
AI User Defined Query: just ask the question
Here's a situation we see all the time. A sales manager wants to know which customers ordered less this quarter than last. The data is sitting in SAP Business One. But getting it out means either finding a report that roughly fits or asking someone who knows SQL to write a query. Often that someone is busy, so the question waits, or it never gets asked at all.
AI User Defined Query removes that hurdle. You type your question in normal business language, something like "show me customers whose order value fell compared to the previous quarter." The tool, which runs on SAP AI Core Services, writes the SQL query for you. You can look it over, and you decide whether to run it.
We like this approach because it keeps people in charge. The AI drafts the query, but it never touches your company data itself. Nothing runs until a person says so.
What happens afterwards matters just as much. Your results open in List View, so you can sort, filter and dig further straight away. Maybe you notice that most of the customers ordering less are in one region. Now you have a new question, and you can follow it right there. If the view turns out to be useful, save it and come back next month. It feels less like reading a report and more like having a conversation with your data.
Ask AI: when the answer isn't only in your system
Some questions can't be answered from your own figures alone. A supplier in Asia announces delays. A new EU regulation is coming. Raw material prices are moving. To understand what that means for you, you need your internal data and outside information side by side.
The usual problem with AI chat tools is that they start with an empty box. Before you get anything useful, you have to explain who you are, what you sell and why you're asking.
Ask AI works the other way round. You start from the record you're already looking at in SAP Business One, such as an item, a business partner or a document. You choose which fields to include in your question, and Ask AI combines that context with research from the internet. Built on the same SAP AI Core Services, it only sees the specific information you decide to share. It has no direct access to your database.
For companies that take data protection seriously (and in Germany, that's pretty much everyone), this is a big deal. You get relevant answers without handing your ERP over to an AI.
Small wins first, specialist ideas later
We always tell customers not to expect one big AI moment. In our experience, the value comes from lots of smaller improvements: fewer manual steps, less copying and pasting, fewer typing errors in documents that need to be right.
Some businesses will want to go further. A wholesaler might want smarter document processing. A manufacturer might have a very specific planning problem. SAP Business One was built with this in mind. Alongside the built-in features, SAP AI services cover areas like document processing and automation, and partners can build their own AI extensions on SAP technology. SAP explains the partner side in its AI Partner Innovations Playbook for SAP Business One.
One thing we've learned: AI is only as good as the data behind it. If your invoices, bank transactions, stock and online shop orders all flow cleanly into SAP Business One, the answers you get will be far more reliable. That's why we connect SAP Business One with tools like DMS and e-invoicing (XRechnung and ZUGFeRD), multibanking, EU FinanceSuite, WMS, Creditsafe, and shop systems such as Shopify, Magento, Shopware and WooCommerce.
Where Ingold Solutions comes in
AI won't replace the know-how in your company. Your team knows your customers, your products and your quirks better than any software ever will. Our job is to give them better tools.
In practice, we start by looking at the questions your team keeps asking and the tasks that eat up their week. From there, we set up SAP Business One and the AI features so they fit how you actually work, and we tidy up the data where needed. Then we train your people properly, not with a slide deck but with their own real questions. After go-live, you keep one contact person at Ingold Solutions for support, updates and anything new you want to try.
Let's talk about your questions.
If there's a business question you've been meaning to answer for months but never had the time or the report for, that's a good place to start. Tell us what it is, and we'll show you how AI in SAP Business One could handle it.
Get in touch with our team, book a free consultation, or try SAP Business One free for 30 days.
Further reading: Practical AI in SAP Business One: from business questions to better decisions (SAP Community)
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