SAP starts making Slack bots for its enterprise software

Enterprise software company SAP announced today that it has created chatbots for users of its Concur expense tracker and SuccessFactors HR software. The bots will initially be available exclusively to users of Enterprise Grid, a new service from chat app Slack for large corporations that also launched today.

More bots are on the way from SAP, a company that works with 335,000 customers and 2.5 million developers.

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“These are certainly the first bots that we’re releasing into the market,” SuccessFactors VP David Ragones told VentureBeat in a phone interview. “You can expect to see a lot more bots coming from SAP in the future built on Slack.”

Initially the SuccessFactors bot will create, add feedback, and allow review of the kinds of achievements often seen in employee reviews. More HR additions may be made in the future. The Concur bot will allow users to do things like ask questions about your travel itinerary, submit expenses, upload receipts, and ask for summary of an expense report.

“Specifically with Concur, we think about bringing our services to where our end users spend their lives, and increasingly enterprise users are spending their lives inside Slack,” Concur VP of platform John Gibbon told VentureBeat in a phone interview. “So we don’t have the hubris to think that people will wake up in the morning and want to spend their lives inside their expense tool. What we wanted to do was make it easier for our end users to do the effortless expense.”

Also making its debut today is a Slack plugin for SAP HANA Cloud Platform, a tool for app development that lets teams keep track of development activity within a Slack channel.

“The way that we think about that is we want to best enable SAP developers to develop great applications and allow them to have rich and deep access to Slack in the process of creating those applications,” Ragones said.

Don’t expect to see these bots in the Slack App Directory just yet. Both Concur and SuccessFactors bots are still in beta, and will be available to the general public later this year, Ragones said.

Last fall, SAP acquired travel and hotel booking company Hipmunk, a company whose services are available on platforms like Facebook Messenger and Slack. An SAP spokesperson declined to respond when asked if Hipmunk will be incorporated into Concur in the future.