There Is A Lot Of Hype About Agentic AI: SAP CTO Herzig

SAP Labs, the research and development (R&D) arm of German software maker SAP, opened its second campus in Bengaluru earlier this month, which will house over 15,000 professionals. The firm says that its centers in India were at par with its headquarters with a mix of product teams, sales, customer experience and marketing. Philipp Herzig, chief technology officer and chief AI officer of SAP SE, in conversation with Avik Das, talks about the critical role of India, future of AI, and why agentic AI is currently more hype than action. Edited excerpts:

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How do you demarcate which operations are done in India and what is done in your biggest research laboratory in Waldorf, Germany?

Every team is a little bit differently set up. Here, of course, we have an amazing talent pool of both engineering but also product and industry knowhow. It is usually a mixture of various factors because for AI, we are distributed over four locations in Palo Alto, Germany, India, and Singapore. We try to keep certain components to align with the time zone which means a closer proximity here of our AI developers also with the AI colleagues that we have in Singapore and Germany, but then we also try to decouple. So then we give ownership to the various teams and try to distribute it based on where it also fits from a skill perspective, investment, capacity, and talent.

Can you also elaborate on what type of AI work is done at SAP Labs in India?