Artificial intelligence has taken over much of what used to be Fabrizio Primerano’s software engineering job. It brainstorms with his colleagues, researches competitors and writes and tests code.
But Mr. Primerano still has a job, at the German software giant SAP. It includes fewer routine tasks and more of what feels like managing and mentoring A.I. agents, or bots that can be programmed to act like personal assistants and, increasingly, human employees.
“It’s freeing me up to do more of this creative work,” Mr. Primerano said recently.
That is what executives of SAP, the largest software company in Europe by market value, say they want. SAP, long seen as a stoic provider of back-office products, says it is taking a lean-in approach to the technology that poses an existential threat to its coders and its business model.
Its leaders concede that A.I. is eliminating the need for humans to do many of the tasks its software engineers did until very recently. In a round of restructuring two years ago, SAP cut nearly 10,000 jobs, some as a result of A.I., the company said. SAP would not break down exactly how many were related to A.I. or say what sort of jobs were eliminated.
To try to avoid eliminating more positions, they say they have encouraged workers to invent new, more valuable jobs, aided by the rapidly improving technology available to them. Company officials say that even with the previous restructuring, they have added more than 3,500 jobs on net since 2023, including new job titles like “forward‑deployed engineers,” or those who work with customers to develop A.I.-driven solutions.
“I’m not sure if here someone in two or three years will still code software,” Christian Klein, the chief executive, told me in a recent interview. He said he did not expect to operate with a smaller work force, “but with a very, very different work force.”
Such a strategy could be a source of hope for Europe, economists say. It might prevent large-scale job losses in some sectors, while plugging unfilled vacancies in others. Europe, an aging continent facing a long fate of slow economic growth, has a chronic lack of skilled workers.
“A.I. might save us from a very severe labor shortage” caused by Europe’s aging demographics, Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln, an economist and the president of the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, told me.
It could be difficult for Europe to replicate SAP’s approach, if it even proves successful, at a large scale. Marcel Fratzscher, an economist and the president of the German Institute for Economic Research, agreed that it had huge potential to salve Europe’s demographic problems. But only if Europe invests significantly and quickly enough in the tech to catch up with the United States or China. Companies like SAP largely depend on American A.I. models and a physical and virtual supply chain that runs through Asia and the United States.
“Europe is lagging behind on adopting A.I. technologies completely,” Mr. Fratzscher said, “because it lacks good digital infrastructure. It lacks the skills.”
Some analysts say SAP’s A.I. strategy is shaky, because it remains so reliant on American A.I. models. The Trump administration moved last month to block foreign nationals from using two of those models, from the company Anthropic. Though the government recently reversed course and lifted restrictions, the move had sounded alarm bells for SAP and its clients.
SAP’s A.I. strategy is “rooted in a geopolitical fault line,” Peter M. Färbinger, the editor in chief of E3 Magazine, which covers the company extensively, wrote last month. “The risks for existing SAP customers are glaring.”
Investors have been pessimistic that A.I. will be a boon for SAP. Over the past year, the company’s stock price has plunged by nearly 50 percent, even though its revenue and profits have grown in that time. Other organizations, like the financial technology company Block, say they are saving money by laying off workers as their A.I. agents get more sophisticated. And analysts are worried that A.I. models have become so skilled at writing software that customers will no longer need SAP to create programs that manage billing or supply chains.
But the company is trying to go with that flow.
On two recent visits to SAP’s headquarters in the German town of Walldorf, on a sprawling campus overlooking asparagus fields, employees and executives spent hours telling me how A.I. has changed their jobs and the services they offer to customers. (When I returned to Berlin, I used a company-provided A.I. software program to help sift through those conversations.)
SAP workers use A.I. tools to try to improve applications for patents and to handle some customer support requests. Its A.I. agents code prototypes for new software, or add new features to existing programs, speeding up the process for developing products.
To help clients grasp how all of those agents could help their business, the company has built de facto A.I.-demonstration centers, including a mock factory floor to illustrate A.I.’s power to improve toolmaking or beer brewing.
Matthias Deindl, a SAP product management executive, said A.I. agents would ultimately help factories retain and automate knowledge that would have been lost as skilled workers retire, like knowing which gear to adjust when a machine starts making a certain disconcerting sound.
Lots of companies across Germany and elsewhere in Europe need that sort of breakthrough. Amid an accelerating wave of retirements, Germany is on track to lose nearly seven million workers, or about 13 percent of its working-age population, over the next decade, according to estimates from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Absent a politically tricky increase of highly skilled immigrants, A.I. offers a lifeline. But European companies have been slower than American rivals at exploring its uses, according to a recent study Ms. Fuchs-Schündeln worked on.
“A.I. could make firms a lot more productive,” she said. “But it’s really important that they use it.”
Germany has one of Europe’s best A.I. uptake rates, including in some unlikely places. Recently, I spent a morning with the analytics staff of TSG 1899 Hoffenheim, a top-flight German soccer team that SAP sponsors. The team uses A.I.-powered SAP software to scout rivals and select tactics for upcoming matches.
The software helps create development plans for players and specific guidance for, say, whether a midfielder should cut left or right when receiving a pass in a particular situation.
A.I. tools give the team “a perspective we didn’t have before,” Timo Gross, TSG Hoffenheim’s chief analyst, told me.
But, he added, it was only a supplemental tool for human coaches, not a replacement for their intuition, particularly when it comes to managing players and their emotions.
Economists are still debating whether A.I. will preserve more jobs across industries than it replaces. At SAP, there is evidence of both.
Jan Portisch, a SAP development manager, told me a story from a conference in Houston this spring. While watching an auto executive discuss a business problem, Mr. Portisch pulled out his phone and tried something: He snapped a photograph of the presentation, uploaded it to an A.I. agent and asked the agent how SAP’s software might solve it.
The agent found a solution. Then it churned out a marketing pitch deck on Mr. Portisch’s phone. It was ready in time for Mr. Portisch to show it to the executive when he walked offstage.
The interaction revealed how A.I. can help workers be more productive, but it also raised a question: If A.I. can help software developers make sales pitches, what’s to stop it from replacing many sales jobs altogether?
SAP has a bet on that. It is adding a new state-of-the art office building to its Walldorf campus. Mr. Klein, the chief executive, cast it as a sign of the company’s faith that its future work force will not shrink.
Mr. Klein has a 9-year-old son. “Probably two years ago, I would have advised him, ‘Oh, become a computer engineer,’” he said. “I’m not so sure if I would advise this anymore.”
Instead, he said he would steer his son toward a profession that deals directly with customers, assisted by A.I.-enhanced work.
Either that, he said, with a grin, or professional soccer.
