A key executive at Europe’s biggest software company is sending a clear message: your job can and will be done with AI.
In a provocative interview with Business Insider, SAP chief finance officer Dominik Asam was asked if the goal of the company’s push to use AI coding tools was to produce more code with the same number of employees.
That’s when he laid out the ruthless calculus.
By using AI, “there’s more automation, simply,” Asam replied. “There are certain tasks which are automated and for the same volume of output we can afford to have less people.”
“I will be brutal,” he added. “For SAP and any other software company, AI is a great catalyst.”
Asam is one of many businesses executives who’ve been startlingly candid about their intentions to displace human labor with AI tools or agents. From their point of view, you can directly replace your overpaid, calling-in-sick grunts with ever-dependable AI agents. Or you can whittle your workforce down to a skeleton crew that are super efficient thanks to the magical abilities of AI.
One wrinkle: for every one of these head honchos gloating about kicking their human underlings to the curb, there’s countless reports of them having to eat their words and beg their ousted workers to come back. Not because they’ve had a moral change of heart, usually, but because they realize that AI kind of sucks. It still hallucinates more than a Delphic oracle, breaks its own guardrails, and doesn’t always make workers more efficient — programmers included, with at least one study showing that their workflows were bogged down by having to constantly double check their AI coding assistant’s dubious suggestions.
Still, the hype around AI in the business realm remains at a fever pitch. SAP’s Asam says the company is using AI to automate the tasks of the thousands of people in its back office operations. And its software engineers are also using AI tools, following the lead of titans like Google and Microsoft whose chief execs both claim that more than a quarter of their code is written by large language models.
As for Asam, he’s so bullish on the tech that he can’t understand why anyone wouldn’t be.
“I am sometimes baffled when I hear from some investors that all customers will write their own software themselves,” he told BI.
These assertions have nothing to do with his personal obsession with AI chatbots, of course, which Asam is a heavy user of.
“I’m preparing a presentation and I want to have some data and I just prompt the tool to say, give me that data,” Asam said. He also asks it for business trivia, like who are the ten most valuable companies in the world.
“Nine of them are tech companies and Broadcom recently threw out Berkshire Hathaway,” Asam said, happily recalling…
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