Thread regarding SAP layoffs

@px You do not understand. It is important to make everybody aware of how valuable Indians are for the company.

@nb most of these rec tu ms are not even Indians. Many of them are a s s burned people from US or Germany and only want to sow hatred towards their colleagues and take the conversations towards senseless rhetoric and racism thus making this platform unviable for sensible and logical discussions.

One Indian can easily replace two or three Europeans or Americans.

SAP should use this to get their house in order.

Interesting, no real dialogue response from both of these comments. Both posters seem to have an interesting view point/position. Not referring to the Indian comments, that’s whole different discussion.

@hh SAP is now an Indian company.

I do not understand why SAP does not do the needful and hire more Indians.

There is no layoffs in sap

All-in on AI – what are the next strategic steps?

With the SAP reorganization known as “Project Fuji,” SAP is making AI a top-level priority: CEO Christian Klein has assumed direct control over key areas such as the “Business AI Platform” and the “Autonomous Suite.” The significance for the company can be summarized in three keywords:

Focus on AI transformation: SAP is consolidating its technology development more closely and aims to “agentify” the world of ERP.
Radical cost-cutting measures: SAP has imposed a drastic hiring freeze for all positions not directly related to AI. Internal travel not directly related to AI development or customer service has been canceled – (hopefully) to finance necessary investments.
Altered leadership structure: from an external perspective, the responsibilities of the former head of development were integrated into the corporate leadership team to reduce bureaucratic hurdles and shorten development cycles for AI applications. In reality, however, the reorganization was likely—as is so often the case—driven primarily by the individuals involved.
As we see it, a fundamental shift is indeed taking place in our business model and in the very purpose of our enterprise software. Just one example from the recent Dkom: an agent is being built for a “team of ten” that processes 50,000 invoices a month. This means that the actors involved—viewed through the lens of the “current” landscape—are changing; the users operating our “current” software will increasingly be AI agents.

This is also evident in the Business Data Cloud, where SAP consolidates existing solutions—such as SAP Datasphere and SAP Analytics Cloud—positioning it as a comprehensive data and analytics platform (SaaS) that serves as a central data foundation for enterprises. From a technological standpoint, it is file-oriented to accommodate the heterogeneity of the data landscape. The company moved away from a fixation on the “one and only” HANA columnar orientation some time ago. Instead, a key objective is decoupling data storage scaling from compute power scaling—a requirement particularly relevant for LLMs, given the distinction between their training and inference phases.

Problem: Databricks, for instance, has been successfully pursuing this approach since its founding in 2013[!] with its “Data Lakehouse” architecture, which combines traditional data storage (data warehouses) with flexible data repositories (data lakes). Another competitor in this space is Snowflake.

To this end, SAP has acquired Dremio, a type of “query engine” capable of managing data directly at its storage location (e.g., cloud storage) without the need for complex ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) processes. Dremio’s technology is intended to serve as a central catalog (based on Apache Polaris) that provides the necessary context for the world of AI agents.

The strategic challenge for SAP will be to capitalize on the shift in corporate IT budgets toward “AI tokens” and away from the traditional transactional ERP business, rather than withering away like a “dinosaur” in a shrinking market segment.

What are the implications for us employees? That is currently difficult to foresee. Several scenarios are conceivable, depending on how successfully SAP implements its strategy.

As Hubert Klein describes in his article “How many fewer employees should there be?“, workforce reductions have already been underway for two years in Germany—and specifically at the Walldorf corporate headquarters. According to the social report, the net decline there between the peak staffing level in December 2023 and December 2025 amounts to approximately 1,600 (-13%)[!]—and this occurred without any corresponding announcement… The expansion in Munich and Berlin cannot compensate for this.

All-in on AI and professional development

In any case, there seems to be movement in further training with the topic of AI. On the one hand, it seems to be the case that experience pays off when dealing with AI because it is very helpful in assessing its results. SAP’s strength has so far been the combination of business process know-how with the necessary technological competence. Unfortunately, a good portion of the people who had this combination were sent into retirement with a lot of money.

On the other hand, we are now receiving emails from the Executive Board with some regularity encouraging us to use our working hours for further training. For instance, on June 18, Muhammad Alam stated—among others—that “Starting now, two hours of focused learning time per week will be protected for everyone at SAP” [emphasis as in the email], a point also echoed by Gina at the last works council meeting. Thomas Saueressig, meanwhile, wrote to us on February 26, 2025—marking SAP People Development Day and noting that “SAP will prioritize skills-based learning and upskilling in 2025”—stating: “we encourage you to dedicate 15% of your working time to learning and development …” [emphasis as in the email].

This raises the question: what do these discrepancies mean? Is our working time now being reduced to 13.3 hours? Is the Executive Board backtracking? Does “2026” simply not mean “2025”—are there new priorities now? Has our training time budget suddenly been exhausted due to this mid-year announcement of changes (which would fit the current cost-cutting program)? Has the Executive Board perhaps simply forgotten its statement from last year? Or do the figures not matter because no one tracks them anyway?

Why does the Executive Board feel compelled to issue such requirements regarding time allocation within the framework of our trust-based working time model? It is interesting to note that, for performance management, the Board relies on explicit steering mechanisms—such as target-setting systems linked to compensation—whereas for professional development, it limits itself to mere appeals.

Anyone wanting to take the pressure off their manager should, at the very least, complete the various mandatory training courses on compliance and the like—after all, this is tracked, and to our knowledge, managers are sometimes even incentivized via bonuses based on these metrics.

All-in on AI – Key Milestones

What will be the relevant milestones that allow us to see whether SAP can successfully implement its strategy? Several things come to mind in this regard. First of all, from the employees’ perspective…

What is the productivity per employee? And do we share in the benefits of this hopefully increased productivity?
How is employee freedom evolving? Is AI leading us into a world of granular control exercised by the few over the many, or is it expanding the scope of freedom we enjoy as employees?
Is SAP taking us along on the journey, or are they opting for a change of personnel instead?
And from the company’s side?

The topic of private cloud has arguably been put to bed. S/4HANA Public Cloud adoption remains a key priority.
How successful will the “Industry AI” area be under Dominik Metzger? Can we achieve Palantir-like industry AI models? What do we learn from the failure of the “Industry Cloud”?
How successfully will the LoB/Autonomous Suite establish genuine agentic usage in the market? How many customers will deploy it, and to what extent?
Can SAP provide its employees with a productive AI development platform?
We will have to see how this develops further.

Article:
At the end of June, our CEO Christian Klein announced a series of structural changes. The changes officially took effect on July 1, 2026. Development now reports under Christian Klein, as before, divided into a “foundation” part under Philipp Herzig, “SAP Business AI Platform & CTO,” and an “applications” part under Manoj Swaminathan, “Autonomous Suite.” As a side note, ABAP development under Sonja Lienard did not make it back into the foundation area. This department remains under Uma Rani, who is responsible for “Private Cloud.” Dominik Metzger is being given the opportunity to raise his profile in the area of Industry AI. Here you can find a presentation that we generated based on the announcement emails.

For now, these are all so-called box moves, and colleagues are being told that nothing will change, except that AI will, of course, become increasingly important.

For now, these are all so-called box moves, and colleagues are being told that nothing will change, except that AI will, of course, become increasingly important.

Since this month, the works councils of SAP SE and SAP D have been negotiating a new version of employment security for SAP in Germany. In principle, we welcome the fact that our employer here in Germany wants to continue offering reliable working conditions. At the same time, we also know that jobs have been reduced in Germany in recent years. In the past, our jobs were protected by a good severance table and the assurance that everyone whose position was eliminated would receive a new job within SAP. This also worked quite well in the two previous measures, “P23” and “Mongoose (P25),” although collective cost centers were also set up because, in practice, it was impossible to place the well-paid to very well-paid colleagues at T4 and T5 level appropriately, especially because all L1 areas were under cost pressure. At the beginning of the month, the ideas were presented to the works council. Put positively: the personal initiative of colleagues affected by job cuts or transfers is to be encouraged; it should also be possible to offer them termination agreements. In other words, the aim is for those affected to take care of their continued employment themselves. At the same time, they are to be offered termination agreements. Voluntarily, of course. Put differently: the affected colleagues are to be left hanging for so long that they become frustrated and then sign a termination agreement. Practice will show which path will be taken in the future. In the past, the process has almost always been very fair. We can only hope that it stays that way.

For us, it is important that the following points are anchored in the works agreement on employment security:

The selection process for the affected colleagues must be transparent.
A job offer should preferably be made at the beginning of the process, or alternatively after four weeks.
Affected colleagues should not be disadvantaged in terms of salary and bonus. Average values should be applied here.

Continued employment must always take priority over termination agreements.
We also proposed that colleagues who are 55 years old or older should have the option of transferring a severance payment into their working time account (AZK); in other words, an early retirement offer should be made.

We very much hope that the new works agreement will not create a basis for ensuring that the announced annual programs run through as smoothly as possible. This would require a broad discussion among the workforce, accompanying the negotiations.