In 'brutal' interview, SAP CFO says AI means the company can produce more software with fewer people (www.businessinsider.com)

At a San Francisco tech event SAP CFO Dominik Asam said the company is aggressively using AI — from chatbots like Perplexity for research and market data to AI coding tools for developers — and that automation already lets SAP produce more software with fewer people. He described AI-driven productivity gains across “thousands” in back-office operations and a developer base of “30,000 plus” engineers being brought onto new coding tools as part of SAP’s five-year plan to raise output and margins. Asam was explicit: “I will be brutal,” meaning certain tasks will be automated and headcount for the same output could shrink if SAP moves faster than competitors. For the AI/ML community, the remarks underline a turning point: enterprise-scale integration of LLM-based assistants and developer tools is shifting software economics. Key technical implications include widespread adoption of code-generation and task-automation pipelines, elevated throughput per engineer, and the emergence of new operational workstreams (tooling, retraining, governance) to scale safely. The strategic debate he frames — whether industrial customers will build in-house with AI or rely on platform vendors — highlights competitive advantages for organizations that implement systematic AI programs quickly; laggards face both market and workforce disruption.