SAP is one of the largest software companies in the world, so when its CEO states that in a very short time there will be no one programmingthings are going to get really complicated for software engineers.
Christian Klein, CEO of SAP, assured in an interview for Financial Review that: “Software development is the function most affected by AI, and there is a possibility that in three or four years there will no longer be anyone developing software at SAP.” Klein’s statement is not a pressure maneuver on his employees, but is part of a strategy that the manager has been building for months, and which now has a name: the Autonomous Company.
A company that wants to reinvent itself from within. SAP has more than 110,000 employees worldwide and is the largest software company in Europe. Of those 110,000 employees, more than 30,000 hold software development positions. That means Klein hopes be able to automate work which today employs more than 27% of its workforce with AI agents.
The CEO shares the idea that the vibe coding It allows someone without technical training to generate software from natural language instructions. Klein, just like Like many other senior technology managers, he sees this as the beginning of the end for programmers. as we know it currently. That is, the role of the software developer will no longer be linked to the generation of the code, but to your supervision.
SAP does not fire, it replaces. However, what Klein wanted to make very clear is that, although SAP will tend to reduce the number of software developers on its staff, that does not mean that it will lay off its employees. They will simply go to develop other roles within the company to meet new development needs.
Klein explains that the workforce will change and product managers, who previously barely programmed, will start working alongside experts from different sectors to create new AI agents. “We need product managers who know how to read code and understand business. Although the demand for developers is low, we need more data scientists,” says the manager.
Looking for AI trainers, not programmers. According to data from the latest study On global trends on the future of work prepared by ManpowerGroup, AI skills have surpassed engineering and computer science as the most difficult to find, with 72% of companies having difficulty filling these positions. The profiles Klein describes, product managers who understand how AI works and design AI agents, do not yet exist in quantity. what the industry needs.
Developer confidence in the code generated by AI fell from 40% to 29% in a single year. 46% of professionals actively distrust these tools. 45% of the code generated by AI contains errors serious safety issues. Klein talks about a future without programmers, but today’s data shows that human supervision is still the difference between a reliable product and one with holes.
Image | SAP, Unsplash (Becomes Co)
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