“Under the policy, only Al-related hiring, customer-facing travel and trips directly linked to the company's Al initiatives or mission-critical employee Al training are exempt, reflecting SAP's focus on "be disciplined in how we spend" while expanding its Al capabilities.”
It will be interesting to see if SAP can turn into the basis for companies that use AI heavily or if companies that use AI heavily will prefer to replace SAP.
Who are the contenders that start fresh with focus on AI?
One that comes to mind is IONOS. They seem to be in the process of building something like a "SAP in the times of AI" from the ground up. Starting with the demands of SMEs. It looks like an interesting approach to me: Having a "knowledge base" for each customer, initially filled with the data from the website. Then let the customers add more data. Then offer agents that do work for the customers. Answer calls and emails and do marketing for example.
Having worked at some giant firms that heavily depend on SAP, I would think their position as "system of record for procurement/production" would get stronger with AI.
e.g. AI + a good database of what your company does seems like an excellent combination.
The same argument can be made about snowflakes and other providers that handle the data layer. If they can leverage AI in a safe contained environment they would become the clear winner
Or AI can be a threat: If AI can spit out good enough special purpose tools a lot of the SAP adaption business goes away. If AI then also assists in data migration the moat goes away.
The big risk for these platforms is that AI reduces the cost to switch to another ERP. IF AI can map all of the data between two different competitors, the whole business model is finished
Anecdotally, I know several companies that have given the directive of "Use more AI instead of hiring more people". I wonder whether this is part of the story here too?
This tells me we’re getting close to “peak bubble.” We saw these same sort of stupid headlines just before the dot-com bubble popped, too. When companies are distorting regular business to do the new thing, they’ve gone past the point of reasonableness on the new thing and we’re ready for a snap-back.
This is less of an issue than the headline suggests. I worked for a publicly traded US company remotely. The company was based between Ft. Lauderdale and West Palm Beach Florida. It was a roll of the dice each spring if the CFO would pull the trigger on a travel block for about 6 weeks around spring break when flights and hotels were most expensive. Approvals were available for critical projects. It was only ever about not exceeding a quarterly budget number; nothing else.
Wait, first they stopped hiring because AI is going to replace everybody. Now they stopped hiring because AI, which was going to replace everybody, costs too much.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 36.1 ms ] thread“Under the policy, only Al-related hiring, customer-facing travel and trips directly linked to the company's Al initiatives or mission-critical employee Al training are exempt, reflecting SAP's focus on "be disciplined in how we spend" while expanding its Al capabilities.”
no-paywall: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49222851
Seriously, why the duck aren't they running their own AI systems in house???
Who are the contenders that start fresh with focus on AI?
One that comes to mind is IONOS. They seem to be in the process of building something like a "SAP in the times of AI" from the ground up. Starting with the demands of SMEs. It looks like an interesting approach to me: Having a "knowledge base" for each customer, initially filled with the data from the website. Then let the customers add more data. Then offer agents that do work for the customers. Answer calls and emails and do marketing for example.
e.g. AI + a good database of what your company does seems like an excellent combination.
Although they may internally use LLM, I wanna say said they were not going to allow their core offering to be integrated with LLM
Although maybe they reversed course?
"No, kids, it means you will be eating less."
https://www.sap.com/products/ai-platform.html
You can’t make this stuff up.