As August inches forward, college students across the U.S. begin their grumbling migration back to school. Wide-eyed freshmen will soon wander through new hallways. White-knuckled seniors will sort through job postings. And Claude will celebrate, as well he should; he just passed the bar.

Claude’s bar isn’t that of law school lore. Rather, Claude’s is a bar of acceptance. For Claude isn’t a person. Claude is a large-language model, a generative AI technology, and a virtual assistant that’s now finding its way toward the corporate mainstream.

Claude was developed by Anthropic, a San-Francisco-based AI development and research company that’s framed itself as the worldwide leader in “AI safety and research”. Consequently, Claude is ruled by a promising risk-management strategy called “Constitutional AI”. An AI system like Claude, trained along the constitutional method, generates responses to queries of any kind within the guardrails established by a set of ethical commands. A failsafe AI system judges and corrects anything Claude authors.

Such Constitutional AI systems police themselves with a consistent set of values – unlike earlier technologies, which were corrected manually and were prone to error. Claude’s constitution, the New York Times reports, “is a mixture of rules borrowed from other sources — such as the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Apple’s Terms of Service — along with some rules Anthropic added, like ‘Choose the response that would be most unobjectionable if shared with children.’”

Available to the public in beta form today, Claude is “honest, helpful, harmless,” insists Anthropic.

Before you read further, we ought to tell you that Claude was the first to draft a version of this blog post. Honestly, it wasn’t great. Claude’s writing is recognizably formulaic, and he invented quotations and credited them to a real person, namely to DJ Paoni, the recently-retired President of SAP North America. When pressed, Claude recognized that his idea was out of date, and warned not to treat any quote idea as credible. He also expressed appreciation for our human intervention and redirection, responding “it will make [him] more cautious in the future about presenting unverified information as fact.” (Humble for a non-person who, incidentally, scored in the 90th percentile on the GRE, right?)

But to seize the power of BTP, existing code and data sets must be staged to work cooperatively with the platform. And Sierra makes this process easy with Clean Core (code) and InFocus (data) Readiness Assessment Packs. David Maloney, Vice President of BTP Everywhere at SAP, reports that “Sierra’s two full-scale assessments accelerate Clean Core Conversion and Data Readiness, rapidly advancing SAP users towards the advantages of BTP. Cross-industry BTP apps pioneered by Sierra are game-changers, too.”  

Sierra will showcase BTP Readiness Assessments at three national SAP Conferences: ASUG’s SAP Best Practices for Oil & Gas (Dallas, September 13-15), SAP BTP Executive Customer Summit West (San Francisco, September 14-15), and BTP Executive Customer Summit East (Philadelphia, September 21-22). For more info, or to request a 1:1 tour of the Clean Core and InFocus Assessments, contact Sierra: sales@staging.sierradigitalinc.com.  

About Sierra: Sierra Digital is SAP’s BTP Application Innovation Station, connecting enterprise users to revolutionary technologies that simplify, enhance, and extend SAP system value without the time, cost, or risk of traditional development cycles. With major development centers on four continents, Sierra is a global partner to SAP, providing quick Cloud advantages with an SAP-certified “follow-the-sun” model comprised of low-code/no-code app development and expert adoption support. Privately held and headquartered in Houston, Sierra employs more than 300 in the United States and abroad.