--- title: "SAP Exec: Get Ready to Be Fired Because of AI" description: "SAP chief finance officer Dominik Asam didn't mince words when asked what the end result of his company's AI usage would be." date: "2025-09-28" modified: "2025-09-28" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/sap-exec-fired-ai" categories: - "Artificial Intelligence" --- # SAP Exec: Get Ready to Be Fired Because of AI ![SAP chief finance officer Dominik Asam didn't mince words when asked what the end result of his company's AI usage would be.]() *Photo Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Photo by Uwe Anspach / picture alliance via Getty Images* A key executive at Europe's biggest software company is sending a clear message: your job can and will be done with AI. In a provocative [interview with *Business Insider*](), SAP chief finance officer Dominik Asam was asked if the goal of the company's push to use AI coding tools was to produce more code with the same number of employees. That's when he laid out the ruthless calculus. By using AI, "there's more automation, simply," Asam replied. "There are certain tasks which are automated and for the same volume of output we can afford to have less people." "I will be brutal," he added. "For SAP and any other software company, AI is a great catalyst." Asam is one of many businesses executives who've been startlingly candid about their [intentions to displace human labor with AI tools or agents](). From their point of view, you can directly replace your overpaid, calling-in-sick grunts with ever-dependable AI agents. Or you can whittle your workforce down to a skeleton crew that are super efficient thanks to the magical abilities of AI. One wrinkle: for every one of these head honchos gloating about kicking their human underlings to the curb, there's countless reports of them having to eat their words and [beg their ousted workers to come back](). Not because they've had a moral change of heart, usually, but [because they realize that AI kind of sucks](). It still hallucinates more than a Delphic oracle, breaks its own guardrails, and [doesn't always make workers more efficient]() — programmers included, with at least [one study]() showing that their workflows were bogged down by having to constantly double check their AI coding assistant's dubious suggestions. Still, the hype around AI in the business realm remains at a fever pitch. SAP's Asam says the company is using AI to automate the tasks of the thousands of people in its back office operations. And its software engineers are also using AI tools, following the lead of titans like Google and Microsoft whose chief execs [both claim]() that [more than a quarter of their code]() is written by large language models. As for Asam, he's so bullish on the tech that he can't understand why anyone *wouldn't* be. "I am sometimes baffled when I hear from some investors that all customers will write their own software themselves," he told *BI*. These assertions have nothing to do with his personal obsession with AI chatbots, of course, which Asam is a heavy user of. "I'm preparing a presentation and I want to have some data and I just prompt the tool to say, give me that data," Asam said. He also asks it for business trivia, like who are the ten most valuable companies in the world. "Nine of them are tech companies and Broadcom recently threw out Berkshire Hathaway," Asam said, happily recalling the answer given to him by Perplexity. "In 1980, it was just IBM. So software does eat the world." Asam joins the prestigious ranks of other tech figures that have fallen under the spell of AI tools, like Elon Musk, who seems to sincerely believe his Grok chatbot will [unlock the secrets of the universe]() when he isn't using it to [generate salacious anime girlfriends](); or the former CEO and cofounder of Uber Travis Kalanick, who's apparently [huffing the same fumes as Musk]() with his conviction that Grok was helping him probe the boundaries of quantum physics. In all, it seems that c-suite members have their own AI occupational hazard: they may not be the ones being replaced by the tech, but they sure are getting their brains melted by it. **More on AI:** *[Fiverr Told Its Employees to Embrace AI, Then Stabbed Them in the Back]()* ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()