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SAP's CEO said AI agents will not run critical work 100% alone.

Christian Klein told the German news agency dpa that SAP's AI agents bring considerable productivity gains, and that customers will hand them more responsibility over time.

ERP LEADERS news desk · · First reported by dpa interview via Der Aktionär / finanzen.net · Edition no. 21
Photo: Norbert Steinhauser / SAP SE/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 4.0 · original

In critical business areas, though, he said the agents will not act 100% autonomously. A human ultimately carries the responsibility.

He called this SAP's biggest growth chance: "The chance for SAP to grow beyond itself has never been greater."

Competitors that rely only on outside large language models risk becoming "easily replaceable", he said. SAP's argument is that its agents sit inside the business processes and the controls.

Earlier this month Klein told Yahoo Finance that the AI business has to show financial results within 12 months.

That puts human sign-off on critical steps into the design. Teams have to decide which steps need it and who stays accountable.

Which step in your SAP month-end close would you never let an agent finish without a human?

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Companies in this story
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For your next steering committee

Questions for your own programme. They are not findings about any company in this story.

  1. 1Ask which AI tools already touch your ERP or finance data, including the ones nobody approved.
  2. 2Ask what each tool is allowed to change, and who reviews what it changed.
  3. 3Ask how the result is measured, and who decides to switch a tool off.

Issue 01 of the ERP LEADERS brief puts a timeline, the three-number review and six questions on one page. Read issue 01

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