Software firm SAP has unveiled a clear strategy around AI, launching more than 200 specialised AI agents and 50-plus assistants that enable companies to use these agents for executing processes autonomously, at its flagship event SAP Sapphire 2026 in Orlando, the US. In an interview with Manu Kaushik, SAP Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Philipp Herzig talks about a broad range of issues, including the rise of AI and its impact on the global job scenario, and India’s AI capabilities. Excerpts:
There is a growing concern globally that AI will replace jobs. What is your view?
I look at agentic coding as canary in a coal mine for what will also happen with many other professions. Initially, people predicted that developers would disappear. That has not happened. The reality is different. Even the number of entry-level jobs is at an all-time high when it comes to software development jobs. The problem is if you don’t know how to use AI coding tools anymore, you don’t have a job anymore. So, the people need to reskill/upskill.
It all comes down to the good old economics. When we got 10x more productive, people just started to consume more and build more. The problem is rather in jobs where demand or pricing is fixed, and there’s no elasticity. In general, I believe AI will create more jobs but at the expense of some jobs.
How do you view India’s position in the global AI landscape?
India is doing extremely well, and is clearly an early adopter of AI technologies. There is tremendous curiosity and ambition among people in India to experiment with and deploy new technologies. The government and state administrations are also actively promoting AI adoption because they see it as a growth opportunity for the country. From what I observe, India is moving aggressively in this space.
Does SAP plan to expand tech hiring in India?
On the AI side, yes. For the broader company-wide hiring numbers, I would need to confirm with our leadership team. But AI talent expansion in India is certainly an area of focus.
SAP has recently unveiled its autonomous enterprise strategy along with its business AI platform. How do these initiatives help your customers save time and resources?
There are clear use cases where customers get a lot of value today. The killer use case is agentic coding. Our tools are delivering 30-50% efficiency gains for developers. The same is true for consultants because we have put all our SAP best practices content in a single place, and our thousands of consultants verify the output.
When you look at other domains, there are still challenges. Take the example of finance, customer experience or HR data. The data lives in multiple places so you need to first bring all the data together. Many people are today building agents in various domains. There is a lack of verifiability because who is judging whether the agent actually is doing what it’s supposed to do. That is lacking in the broader ecosystem, and this is exactly what we are addressing.
How much time does it take for a company to shift from the traditional ERP system to an AI-led ERP system?
There is no one-size-fits-all approach. If the customer is on the cloud, it could take a few days but if the customer is still on their journey from ECC (ERP central component) to “RISE with AI”, that is a longer transformation journey where there’s a lot of effort (required) to clean up the data, bring them to a standardised data model and a lot of groundwork is needed in order to get them into this target state that we are proposing.
Who are going to be early adopters of your latest AI offerings?
There are many customers. ABB in India is doing some agents for RFQs (requests for quote). We met with Standard Chartered Bank which is using a lot of agents for cash collection. It’s a diverse set of companies including pharmaceuticals, financial services, component manufacturers, and retail. We see small companies as much as large companies adopting AI.
Some analysts argue SAP may have been late in integrating AI into ERP systems compared to competitors. How do you respond?
I would ask them to name a company that has truly solved AI adoption at enterprise scale. I do not believe anyone has fully solved that challenge yet. Last year, people said AI was a bubble. Then others claimed software was dead. Now, Stanford has said that software is not dead. But real enterprise adoption requires governance, compliance, security and scalability. That is exactly where SAP is focused, and I believe we are doing very well.
(The reporter was in Orlando at the invitation of SAP)