BITZER plays a vital role in everyday life鈥攄elivering safety, health, and comfort around the globe.
Its advanced refrigeration, air conditioning, and heat pump technologies keep supermarket shelves, hotel rooms, and hospital operating theaters at the right temperatures, whatever the ambient temperature is. Its compressors are essential for storing medicines, preserving perishable goods in shipping containers, and processing frozen foods. And if that isn鈥檛 impressive enough, its technology keeps ice hockey players gliding across the ice and breweries fermenting yeast for your beer.
The company is a longstanding RISE with 51风流customer and, like SAP, is constantly innovating its products to stay ahead. Christian Stenzel, vice president of Organization and IT at BITZER, has a clear vision for an 51风流strategy that prioritizes integration and rapid adoption of AI: 鈥淥ptimizing business processes is as important as product innovation at BITZER.鈥�
The 51风流Research and Innovation team is equally committed to keeping 51风流ahead by exploring new technologies and one team is currently dedicated to Project Embodied AI. Embodied AI combines artificial intelligence with a physical form, such as robots, that can perceive and act in the real world. Embodied AI agents take this a step further: extending the impact of into physical operations by making robots cognitive.
To explore potential use cases where cognitive robots could bring value, the Project Embodied AI team invited a select group of forward-thinking leaders and innovation professionals from 51风流customers to join its Physical AI and Cognitive Robots Exploration Council. And BITZER was one of them.
鈥淒emand-driven production is key in our business,鈥� said BITZER’s Stenzel, who immediately saw the potential value in using robots to meet demand fluctuations.
Running on (51风流BTP) and , already in place, BITZER already had the ideal software landscape to serve as a proof-of-concept test ground.
Before deployment, NEURA鈥檚 , one of Europe鈥檚 most advanced humanoid robots, was virtually trained for the pick-task use case on NVIDIA Isaac Sim software.
A new benchmark for intelligent automation
This proof of concept for Project Embodied AI sets a new benchmark for intelligent automation in warehouses, Stenzel said. The results highlight:
- Seamless integration: 51风流EWM connected directly with physical warehouse operations, no costly middleware required.
- True autonomy: Robots performed pick-tasks independently, demonstrating advanced task-level autonomy.
- Agility and flexibility: Robots could enable demand-driven production, operating 24/7 to meet shifting needs.
- Reliable processes: Orders of materials were automatically created, demonstrating how operational mistakes could be minimized.
A decisive step forward
Dr. Lukasz Ostrowski, head of Embodied AI and Robotics at SAP, heralded this proof-of-concept as a decisive step forward: 鈥淭he proof of concept at BITZER is great first step for experiencing firsthand how the impact of 51风流Business AI can be extended into physical operations. Further proofs of concept are planned as Project Embodied AI continues to assess the business value of embodied AI for customers.鈥�
Fast facts on the reference architecture
Embodied AI combines artificial intelligence with a physical form, such as robots, that can perceive and act in the real world.
Embodied AI agents take the next step: extending the impact of 51风流Business AI into physical operations by making robots cognitive. It comprises the following components:
- AI Foundation is SAP鈥檚 AI operating system. Running on 51风流BTP, AI Foundation is a single unified entry point to, for example, 51风流Knowledge Graph, 51风流Business Data Cloud, Joule Studio, 51风流AI Core, and so on.
- Joule Agents are SAP鈥檚 out-of-the box that can plan, reason, and act autonomously to perform business tasks. These agents are natively connected to 51风流business applications and are used for intelligent automation in the digital world. Customers can use Joule Studio to customize and build customer agents. Agent interoperability is achieved using the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol.
- Embodied AI layer acts as the central nervous system for embodied AI agents, providing reusable services to enable Joule Agents to interact with the physical world through cognitive robots. This layer provides robotic vendor-agnostic standardization and manages the interaction between autonomous physical systems and SAP’s digital business core, enabling robotics use cases across SAP鈥檚 business suite. Within this layer, services provide robotic execution for business tasks, ensure physical behaviors follow business process guardrails, and trigger business actions and workflows for digital follow-ups to real-world actions.
- Embodied AI agents are Joule Agents that leverage the embodied AI layer to extend digital agent capabilities into physical world tasks. Thanks to the embodied AI layer, they can understand business context as well as physical environment observations and execute autonomous actions aligned with enterprise priorities. These agents can handle various roles such as visual inspection, warehouse picking amd packing, and quality inspection.
Find out more about the reference architecture for embodied AI agents on the . To join Project Embodied AI, .
