Overview

ABB Group is a Swedish-Swiss technology company, that operates in the fields of electrification and automation. The company was formed in 1988 from the merger of two electrical engineering companies, ASEA of Sweden and Brown, Boveri & Cie (BBC) of Switzerland.

Supernova Award Category

Tech Optimization and Modernization

The Problem

For ABB (Manufacturing), SAP application development was historically characterized by manual, fragmented, and effort-intensive processes spanning the entire lifecycle, from requirements analysis to production deployment.

The Solution

To enhance efficiency and consistency, ABB collaborated with TCS to implement iR2D (Intelligent Requirements to Deployment), a human-in-the-loop agentic AI solution built on SAP BTP's AI Core and related services. The solution leverages specialized AI agents to augment critical development activities, including user story generation, design documentation, code generation, and test case creation.

The results

Early results have been very encouraging, with the team observing meaningful improvements in delivery speed, output consistency, and developer productivity. Adoption across teams is increasing steadily, and feedback from practitioners has been positive. The human-AI effort distribution is progressively shifting from a predominantly manual model toward a more automation-assisted, human-governed approach.

As part of its roadmap, iR2D 2.0 is expected to expand capabilities to include areas such as code reverse engineering, test data generation, and configuration automation, further supporting ABB's goal of driving efficiency and innovation in SAP application development.

Metrics

• Efficiency: 30–35% improvement in SDLC productivity
• Accuracy: ~70% average AI accuracy (up to 80–90% for some agents)
• Adoption: 100+ users actively piloting the platform
• Quality: Reduced rework and improved consistency via standardized outputs
• Technical Debt: Reduced through reuse of existing solutions and guided enhancements

ABB has realized substantial business benefits, including 30–50% faster delivery cycles through parallelized and automated processes, 80% improved quality due to standardized outputs and reduced manual errors, 35% enhanced productivity across developers, architects, and testers, and greater consistency in documentation and code quality across teams.

The Technology

• iR2D (Intelligent Requirement-to-Deployment) – Agentic AI platform
• SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP)
• AI/LLM models with enterprise knowledge grounding

Disruptive Factor

Implementing AI-driven code generation raised concerns around accuracy and technical debt, which ABB mitigated by grounding AI models in its own code base and maintaining human validation loops. iR2D disrupts traditional ERP delivery by shifting from effort-heavy services to an AI-powered, software-led model. It challenges the status quo by embedding intelligence across the SDLC, enabling real-time decision support and automation. Its ability to reduce technical debt while accelerating delivery sets it apart from conventional GenAI tools.

Shining Moment

The most impactful achievement was successfully operationalizing Agentic AI at scale within a live enterprise ERP environment. Demonstrating iR2D jointly at SAP Sapphire with ABB validated its real-world applicability and positioned ABB as a frontrunner in AI-led ERP transformation.

https://www.linkedin.com/events/fromrequirementtoreality-abb-sa7457662956819070976/