![\"SAP](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/sap-exec-fired-ai.jpg\")
<\/p>\n\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\t\t\tPhoto Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins \/ Futurism. Source: Photo by Uwe Anspach \/ picture alliance via Getty Images<\/p>\n
A key executive at Europe\u2019s biggest software company is sending a clear message: your job can and will be done with AI.<\/p>\n
In a provocative interview with Business Insider<\/a>, SAP chief finance officer Dominik Asam was asked if the goal of the company\u2019s push to use AI coding tools was to produce more code with the same number of employees.<\/p>\n That\u2019s when he laid out the ruthless calculus.<\/p>\n By using AI, \u201cthere\u2019s more automation, simply,\u201d Asam replied. \u201cThere are certain tasks which are automated and for the same volume of output we can afford to have less people.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI will be brutal,\u201d he added. \u201cFor SAP and any other software company, AI is a great catalyst.\u201d<\/p>\n Asam is one of many businesses executives who\u2019ve been startlingly candid about their intentions to displace human labor with AI tools or agents<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n One wrinkle: for every one of these head honchos gloating about kicking their human underlings to the curb, there\u2019s countless reports of them having to eat their words and beg their ousted workers to come back<\/a>. Not because they\u2019ve had a moral change of heart, usually, but because they realize that AI kind of sucks<\/a>. It still hallucinates more than a Delphic oracle, breaks its own guardrails, and doesn\u2019t always make workers more efficient<\/a> \u2014 programmers included, with at least one study<\/a> showing that their workflows were bogged down by having to constantly double check their AI coding assistant\u2019s dubious suggestions.<\/p>\n Still, the hype around AI in the business realm remains at a fever pitch. SAP\u2019s 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<\/a> that more than a quarter of their code<\/a> is written by large language models.<\/p>\n As for Asam, he\u2019s so bullish on the tech that he can\u2019t understand why anyone wouldn\u2019t be.<\/p>\n \u201cI am sometimes baffled when I hear from some investors that all customers will write their own software themselves,\u201d he told BI.<\/p>\n These assertions have nothing to do with his personal obsession with AI chatbots, of course, which Asam is a heavy user of.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m preparing a presentation and I want to have some data and I just prompt the tool to say, give me that data,\u201d Asam said. He also asks it for business trivia, like who are the ten most valuable companies in the world.<\/p>\n \u201cNine of them are tech companies and Broadcom recently threw out Berkshire Hathaway,\u201d Asam said, happily recalling the answer given to him by Perplexity. \u201cIn 1980, it was just IBM. So software does eat the world.\u201d<\/p>\n Asam joins the prestigious ranks of other tech figures that have fallen under the spell of AI tools, like Elon Musk, who seems to sincerely believe his Grok chatbot will unlock the secrets of the universe<\/a> when he isn\u2019t using it to generate salacious anime girlfriends<\/a>; or the former CEO and cofounder of Uber Travis Kalanick, who\u2019s apparently huffing the same fumes as Musk<\/a> with his conviction that Grok was helping him probe the boundaries of quantum physics.<\/p>\n In all, it seems that c-suite members have their own AI occupational hazard: they may not be the ones being replaced by the tech, but they sure are getting their brains melted by it.<\/p>\n