SAP confident that artificial intelligence will create new jobs

German software maker SAP SE believes artificial intelligence (AI) will create new jobs, even as the rise of the new technology casts a shadow over human jobs.

“We believe that artificial intelligence will create more jobs by increasing productivity. We are working with our partners,” Muhammad Alam, member of SAP’s product engineering executive committee, said at a company roundtable with the media held at the Research and Development (R&D) Labs in Bengaluru. , leveraging artificial intelligence and improving project productivity” Wednesday.

“Artificial intelligence helps us accelerate migration and reduce implementation costs, further driving our business growth,” Alam said.

CEO Christian Klein echoed similar sentiments, saying that as AI-driven businesses grow, the demand for developers will increase, which will increase the developer pool in India.

“In India, the economy is diversifying rapidly and all these customers need software; it’s a great place for tech. “Now we can code that software faster and be more efficient, but we have to code more software. And As long as this is the case, we will also invest further. Also here, India’s development workforce will further increase.

“While artificial intelligence may appear to reduce the number of people performing a task, we need to see more job opportunities across multiple technologies as a result of artificial intelligence.” Forrest Research. He added that technology spending by organizations will increase and AI will help create new jobs generated by companies investing in new AI technologies.

SAP, a software maker headquartered in Walldorf, Germany, provides the world’s largest companies with software that manages their business processes, including human resources, finance, supply chain management and inventory.

The SAP board’s positive talk about artificial intelligence contrasts with comments from Google parent Alphabet Inc Chief Executive Sundar Pichai, who sounded a wake-up call for programmers’ jobs during a post-earnings conference call with analysts. .

“We are also using AI internally to improve our coding processes to increase productivity and efficiency. Today, more than a quarter of new code at Google is generated by AI and then reviewed and accepted by engineers. With analysts stated on the conference call.

Back home in India, the chief executive of the country’s largest software services company has been seeking to allay investor concerns about the threat to jobs posed by generative artificial intelligence (GenAI).

“ChatGPT aroused a lot of early interest. But people slowly realized that it is most useful for solving one type of problem.” K. Krithivasan, CEO of Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., India’s largest software services company, said in an interview with Mint on July 12 “People are realizing that it’s not going to take away all the jobs, but it’s going to take humans,” said. “

The launch of ChatGPT about two years ago put GenAI on the map and into company boardroom discussions for its ability to generate content in video, audio and written formats.

Krithivasan’s colleague Salil Parekh, CEO of Infosys Ltd., echoed similar sentiments. “So, at this stage, my feeling is that (artificial intelligence) technology will help businesses grow further more than any other technology. We are not seeing any layoffs at Infosys due to these new-age technologies,” Parekh said on August 26 told PTI in an interview.

These comments are significant for India, which graduates at least one million engineering students every year. The leap in demand for new technologies will lead to changes in the skills required of graduates.

According to Mint’s report on March 13, “prompt engineers” are an industry term that refers to programmers who are good at instructing AI models to produce optimal results. These companies are attracting demand from large companies keen to recruit talents with GenAI skills. .

For now, the benefits of artificial intelligence remain unclear as most local companies avoid disclosing revenue from new technologies, unlike global peers Accenture and IBM.

IBM’s GenAI-related business books (bookings and actual sales) exceeded $2 billion as of July 2024, while Accenture, the world’s largest software services company, reported that Gen AI bookings for the fiscal year ending in August 2024 were 3 billion US dollars.

Addressing shareholders at the company’s 43rd annual general meeting, Infosys Chairman Nandan Nilekani said that large companies will be slower to embrace Gen AI than consumer-facing companies.

“The world is in the early stages of the AI ​​revolution. Unlike the rapid rollout of consumer AI, enterprise AI requires companies to make significant changes within the company, organize data, build responsible systems, follow industry rules. Many countries, etc. .As a result, enterprise artificial intelligence will take years to unfold.

For SAP, a little more than half of its revenue comes from its cloud business. The company reported revenue of $9.06 billion between July and September 2024, with $4.66 billion in cloud business alone.