By Mauro Orru

SAP appointed Microsoft's Walter Sun as global head of artificial intelligence, a move that underscores the business-software company's efforts to secure a larger share in this fast-growing market.

The Walldorf, Germany-based group said that Sun had joined SAP on Friday from his role as vice president of Copilot Applied Artificial Intelligence for business applications at Microsoft.

"AI has never been more important. I believe at SAP, we have a unique opportunity to fundamentally change the way in which companies operate, using AI on a much larger scale in business practices than ever before," Sun said.

Recent advancements in generative AI--shown by the popularity of OpenAI's ChatGPT, Microsoft's Bing and Google's Bard chatbots--sparked a wave of investments from tech companies as they jockey for position in a rapidly evolving market that looks set to revolutionize the future of human labor.

SAP in July announced direct investments in three generative AI companies, namely Aleph Alpha, Anthropic and Cohere. During Sun's tenure at Microsoft, the U.S. tech giant announced a multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI, substantially bolstering its relationship with the startup behind the viral ChatGPT chatbot.

Part of Microsoft since 2005, Sun brought in the Bing Predicts feature to leverage anonymized and aggregated data for predictive analytics. He spearheaded several AI features across Microsoft's portfolio, including Bing Search.

Earlier this year, Microsoft unveiled an AI-powered version of its Bing search engine to give users direct, conversational answers to queries instead of long lists of links.

Write to Mauro Orru at mauro.orru@wsj.com; @MauroOrru94

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

September 01, 2023 09:00 ET (13:00 GMT)

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