{"id":33540,"date":"2026-06-10T05:47:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-10T05:47:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/33540\/"},"modified":"2026-06-10T05:47:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-10T05:47:09","slug":"the-future-of-ai-is-teaching-machines-how-businesses-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/33540\/","title":{"rendered":"The future of AI is teaching machines how businesses work"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"TheChristian Klein, CEO of SAP, in New Delhi on Tuesday. Klein said he had an hour- long talk with Prime Minister Narendra Modi where the two discussed India\u2019s 2047 development ambitions, AI-led improvements in agriculture and infrastructure, workforce skilling, and stronger economic ties between India and Europe. The conventional wisdom in AI is that the winners will be the companies building the biggest models and the countries investing the most money in chips and data centres.SAP CEO Christian Klein believes the next winners may look very different. The German software giant\u2019s chief executive argues that large language models are steadily becoming commoditised and that the next battle will be fought in a less glamorous corner of the technology industry: teaching AI how businesses actually operate.\u201cThe first phase of AI was about infrastructure, chips and large language models,\u201d Klein told TOI on Tuesday during his trip to New Delhi where he spoke to the Prime Minister. \u201cThe next phase is different. The question is no longer who has the biggest model, but who can teach AI how businesses actually operate.\u201dThat shift, he believes, could create a significant opportunity for India.For much of the past three years, the AI conversation has been dominated by companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic, along with the chipmakers powering the boom. Countries have been judged largely by whether they have produced a worldclass foundation model.By that measure, India has often been portrayed as lagging behind. Klein sees the situation differently. As AI moves beyond chatbots and content generation into the day-to-day running of businesses, he believes a different set of attributes will become valuable. Simply training a model on vast amounts of public information will no longer be enough, instead the AI models will have to be taught how supply chains work, how factories operate, how procurement decisions are made, how inventories are managed and how companies comply with regulations.\u201cThe real value will come from understanding supply chains, finance, manufacturing and regulation, and turning that knowledge into business outcomes,\u201d Klein said.This is the thinking behind what SAP calls the \u201cautonomous enterprise\u201d. Rather than focusing on AI assistants that answer questions, SAP wants to build AI agents that can perform business tasks. These systems are being trained on decades of enterprise data and business processes collected across industries ranging from manufacturing and retail to utilities and transportation.SAP believes such agents will increasingly handle activities such as financial closing, inventory optimisation, workforce administration, sourcing decisions and contract reviews. The striking part is how quickly Klein believes the shift is already happening.\u201cNo one at SAP is checking contracts anymore,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s all done by AI already.\u201dYet Klein does not see foundation model companies as competitors. \u201cI have no sleepless nights about that,\u201d he said when asked about firms such as Anthropic. \u201cYou need both. You need SAP\u2019s AI and an LLM to really apply AI successfully.\u201dAs Klein explains it, an AI model may be able to summarise a report or answer a question, but it does not automatically know how to close a company\u2019s books, optimise a manufacturing line or manage a procurement workflow. That knowledge, Klein argues, sits inside enterprise systems and business processes.<\/p>\n

Indian IT fears overblown<\/p>\n

The implications extend well beyond SAP. For decades, Indian IT services companies built global businesses by helping organisations implement software and redesign business processes. The rise of generative AI has raised concerns that automation could undermine parts of that model. Klein believes the opposite may happen.\u201cThere is a perception that AI threatens the traditional IT services industry,\u201d he said. \u201cI think the bigger story is how it transforms it.\u201dAccording to him, companies adopting AI will increasingly need partners who understand both technology and business operations. \u201cCompanies will need partners who understand how businesses run, how processes work and how AI can be embedded into day-to-day operations,\u201d he said. \u201cThe future is not just about building models. It\u2019s about teaching those models how to create value inside an enterprise.\u201dThat is one reason Klein believes India may be better positioned for the next phase of AI than many assume.\u201cA lot of people assume India missed the AI race because the biggest foundation models came from elsewhere,\u201d he said. \u201cAs AI moves from research to real-world business applications, India\u2019s strengths become much more important.\u201dThose strengths stem from decades spent helping global companies run their operations. Indian technology firms, consultants and engineers have accumulated deep expertise in sectors ranging from banking and manufacturing to logistics and healthcare.In Klein\u2019s view, that experience could become one of the country\u2019s biggest advantages as AI becomes more embedded in business operations. The shift is already changing the skills SAP itself is looking for. Rather than hiring large numbers of traditional software developers, the company is increasingly seeking data scientists, data engineers and AI specialists capable of building and training intelligent agents.\u201cIt\u2019s not about coding features any more. That\u2019s done by AI,\u201d Klein said. \u201cIt\u2019s about developing very smart agents and providing them to our customers.\u201dFor young engineers, he believes technical skills alone will not be enough. \u201cThe best people are the ones who not only have the technical skills to build an agent, but also understand the business problem they are trying to solve,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

SAP\u2019s India ops<\/p>\n

The German firm is also increasingly looking to India as a critical part of their strategy to create AI agents that are adept at running business functions. The company recently opened a second Bengaluru campus and Klein said India is now SAP\u2019s largest development centre globally by headcount. SAP Labs India is about 17,000 strong. More importantly, he said, Indian teams are taking ownership of products and AI innovation.\u201cThere is no one in Germany, no one in the US telling the people what to do,\u201d Klein said. \u201cWe really shifted complete responsibilities over.\u201dThe company plans to bring its entire global leadership team to Bengaluru in January. Klein also said SAP is working with Indian partners including TCS<\/a> and the Adani Group<\/a> on sovereign cloud initiatives that would keep data, operations and AI development within the country. As businesses move from experimenting with AI to deploying it at scale, Klein believes India will play an increasingly important role in shaping how enterprise AI is built and adopted around the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Christian Klein, CEO of SAP, in New Delhi on Tuesday. Klein said he had an hour- long talk…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":33541,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21036],"tags":[31311,23161,31310,9695,31297],"class_list":["post-33540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sap","tag-adani-group","tag-christian-klein","tag-kleins","tag-sap","tag-tcs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33540"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33540\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}