CFO SAP: AI will reduce the workforce – but warns against the “disaster” if it is poorly managed

According to CFO Dominik Asam, the 320 billion dollars software giant, it will probably need fewer engineers to deliver the same thing, or even more, according to the financial director of the company Dominik Asam.

“There is more automation, simply,” said Asam Initiate of Business. “There are certain tasks that are automated and for the same production volume, we can afford to have fewer people.”

As the C-Suite manager of the most precious software company in Europe, Asam has warned that this reality will only be realized if the business world correctly implements technology. After all, a recent MIT study revealed that 95% of AI generative pilots did not reach the brand.

“I will be brutal. And I also say it internally. For SAP and any other software company, AI is an excellent catalyst. It can be excellent or disaster,” warned Asam.

“It will be great if you do it well, if you are able to implement it and do it faster than the others. If you are left behind, you will have a problem for sure. We work day and night so as not to late. ”

SAP workforce will not be alike

With 110,000 employees worldwide, AI has been at the top of SAP for years (the term is now part of its company description). But similar to its financial director, the CEO of the company, Christian Klein, assessed how technology will allow him to reshape his workforce.

“It would be an illusion to believe that AI will help and stimulate more productivity, but the workforce will always be the same,” said Klein Time last month. “This will absolutely not be the case. But I also cannot imagine a workforce with digital workers.”

He estimated that around 60 to 70% of jobs could become digital.

“Do I expect to need the same amount of developers, sellers and consultants in the future? Certainly not with the job profiles they have today,” he added.

At the same time, Klein noted that other professions, such as data scientists, will be more in demand. But as Asam, he admitted that the completely workforce of his workforce during the night could be a disaster recipe.

“Become CEO and believe that now you are making a decision, and you have the power, so everyone will follow, is probably the biggest error you can make,” said Klein.

“You can set up a lot of policies, you can exert more pressure, but people will not follow automatically. You have to communicate too much during the change to convince people.”

The company announced in July that it was investing in training programs and new hires in essential growth areas while planning at the same time as planning targeted measures which should affect approximately 1 to 2% of the global workforce of SAP in 2025.

“While our industry undergoes a deep transformation motivated by AI and Cloud technologies, we focus on continuous optimization of our processes and our structures, as well as on strategic investments in future capacities,” said a spokesperson for the company Fortune.

Business workforce reshaping

SAP is not the only one to realize that the capacities of AI mean that they must rethink the size and shape of their workforce to stay in advance.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told its employees that if a recent technological innovation meant that fewer people would be in some jobs and others were going to go to others, in the end, the number of Amazon employees would shrink.

“It is difficult to know exactly where it takes place over time, but in the coming years, we expect it to reduce our total workforce from the company when we get efficiency gains by largely using AI throughout the business,” Jassy wrote in a June memo.

At Salesforce, this reality fueled by AI has already taken shape, with CEO Marc Benioff admitting that he was able to reorganize his customer support workforce – and reduce the workforce by 9,000 to 5,000.

As leaders seem to agree that the numbers of tomorrow will be thinner than today, managers like the CEO of Goodwill, Steve Preston, fear that the changes hurt the most of those at the bottom of the ladder.

“I do not know that it will be catastrophic, but I think we will see a significant reduction in a certain number of jobs,” said Preston Fortune. “I think it will strike particularly hard low -wage workers.”

Note: a previous edition of this article indicated that inaccurate that Salesforce had reduced his workforce in two thanks to the AI. A company spokesperson said that the changes were exclusive to customer support, and many workers were moved to new departments or the roles have not been padded.

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