Presented by SAP
SAP consulting projects today involve large amounts of documentation, multiple stakeholders, and compressed timelines, often requiring manual knowledge retrieval from online SAP documentation. Additionally, cloud ERP programs now demand faster design cycles, continuous enhancements rather than big-bang rollouts, and near-real-time decision making. Juul for Consultants, SAP’s conversational AI solution, was designed to meet these expectations and assist consultants in their daily tasks, from collating best practices and validating design ideas to navigating SAP’s expanding AI, data, and application landscape.
The result: Consultants work more productively than ever, with better results, and deliver faster, higher quality SAP Cloud transformation.
That promise attracted the early attention of KPMG firms, who became some of the largest SAP enablers participating in the Juul Early Access program, and one of SAP’s largest customers overall. The organization has so far onboarded 29 KPMG member firms around the world, and thousands of KPMG consultants are now using Juul for Consultants in their daily work.
"For us it was not about experimenting," says Valentino Koester, global head of SAP360 and SAP AI programs at KPMG International. "It was about putting our people and member firm clients at the forefront of AI-enabled consulting."
global knowledge
"Competitive pressure in the SAP implementation market is intense," Koester says. "Your main asset as a consultant is knowledge and experience, in all aspects. AI and Juul for Consultants allow us to instantly scale that knowledge across our global network, ensuring clients can access it from around the world, no matter who they talk to in the organization."
Be it a junior consultant or a senior manager, Juul ensures that SAP best practices, industry benchmarks, and innovation that an organization has invested in over the years is not hidden somewhere in a team or in a country where it cannot be shared with speed and accuracy.
"This makes our teams more agile in responding to evolving customer needs or regulatory changes, when new market entrants emerge or technology changes," Koester says. "The agility achieved by our advisors allows us to advise clients not just reactively, but proactively. In many cases, this becomes a form of early forecasting."
For example, consultants can quickly identify potential supply chain risks through AI-enabled process mining that they have implemented for a client, or apply analytical capabilities with SAP Analytics Cloud before those risks materialize.
Overcoming challenges, reducing pain points
KPMG client transformations typically follow KPMG’s transformation methodology, which is closely aligned with SAP’s RISE methodology. Koester explains that RISE goes through six SAP active phases: discover, prepare, explore, realize, deploy, and run, and each has recurring challenges that can slow down momentum.
In the discovery phase, teams invest heavily in business-case modeling, benchmarking, and stakeholder alignment – activities that are time-intensive and difficult to accomplish without full visibility. The preparation phase involves extensive project mobilization, reporting demands, early risk identification and introduction of governance arrangements, any of which can stall progress before execution begins.
During the exploration and implementation phases, lengthy design workshops and piles of documentation can hinder decision making. Defects and bottlenecks must be identified as early as possible, otherwise they risk spilling over into rework. In the deploy and run phases, organizations must develop and deliver training materials while overcoming change resistance, which requires constant communication to maintain adoption. Once live, continuous KPI monitoring and process optimization helps prevent problems from settling into the operating model and reducing value over time. AI can help advisors perform these tasks as well as any necessary reviews and corrections with a higher level of accuracy and faster than ever before.
"By adopting tools like Juul for Consultants, we want to enhance the work of our professionals, make them more effective and more productive, so they have more time to focus on what matters most," Koester said. "That is customer relationships, strategic decision making and delivering measurable business results. "
How AI changes perspectives
Juul for Consultants is not only reducing repetitive work; It is also reshaping how KPMG approaches SAP-enabled changes. AI tools have brought to the fore insights that traditionally required deep expertise and immediate return, increasing advisors’ ability to respond to market dynamics and competitive pressure.
For example, in initial design workshops with customers, unless there were highly experienced consultants on site who could answer, in real time, every question about business processes, as well as explain the design considerations and all the technical logic in the new system, consultants often had to postpone answers or validate them for later, especially when new questions or edge cases arose, slowing down the pace of change.
“With Juul for Consultants, we were hoping to validate the guidance provided by our consultants in real-time, to maintain the pace of implementation and strengthen customer confidence in their SAP systems and KPMG consultants.”" Koester said. "Our people can now quickly surface SAP best practices, guidelines, and risk scenarios during workshops to help our teams move forward, helping to reduce engagement delays."
They’re seeing similar success during internal learning and enablement or sales-related activities. Juul has supercharged KPMG’s internal SAP University, a learning program for new employees. Recently, junior consultants have been able to prepare and present complex and technical RFP responses with confidence, despite limited experience, because Juul guided them through each step in a structured, high-quality manner.
Creating a successful roll-out
To ensure a smooth internal roll out process for analysts, KPMG positioned Juul not as the introduction of a new tool, but as the adoption of a new way of working.
"We emphasized the organizational impact it will enable smarter, more effective ways of working with Juul," Koester said. "Consultants quickly saw the benefits, such as less time searching for technical information and more time advising their clients and doing the functional work in which we are very strong."
Responsible AI remained a key pillar of the rollout. In addition to aligning the initiative with KPMG’s Trusted AI Framework, each participating KPMG firm conducted a risk assessment to mitigate potential risks for clients and ensure compliant, safe use of Juul for consultants. So early adoption started with awareness-raising conversations across the network, helping teams understand what these “new ways of working” look like and where AI could actually support delivery. KPMG has also appointed a dedicated enablement team to ensure that Juul for Consultants is integrated into the broader organizational picture.
"We are working week by week to increase active acceptance by advisors, while also taking the opportunity to get their feedback." He explains. "Our grassroots innovation feedback tool doesn’t just ask what they like and dislike, but also what successful use cases they’re uncovering, and how much time they think they’re saving."
He says the goal is not to automate consulting, but to enable consultants to do their jobs better. And as Juul continues to grow for consultants, KPMG expects its role to expand significantly over time. SAP continues to enhance the feature set and response quality with each release, while it works on developing AI agents that collaborate with consultants and intelligently automate parts of selected workflows. KPMG is collaborating closely with SAP to responsibly integrate these capabilities into more phases of transformation projects as they mature, so that Juul becomes a part of its holistic approach to consulting.
“If early signs hold true, Juul is not just a helpful tool for consultants – it is on its way to becoming a standard in the way SAP projects are delivered,” says Koester.
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