Despite the tremendous progress artificial intelligence has made in recent years, human developers and employees will always play a key role, SAP has said.
At the SAP TechEd 2023 conference in Bangalore, AI was perhaps unsurprisingly front and center for the software giant, which unveiled a slew of new AI tools and services to work with the recently announced Joule copilot.
However, several key SAP officials were keen to emphasize that despite these steps forward, there will always be a place for human workers in the development process.
Developers forever
“Certainly not,” said Juergen Mueller, CTO of SAP, when asked whether AI will eliminate developer jobs, “but as with many other technologies, changes will happen.”
“What’s going to happen is the roles are going to change,” he said. “I like to use the example of a calculator, this used to be a human job… but now I have my phone, and of course it has the more advanced technology on it… but that doesn’t mean we don’t have to understand math anymore, and we don’t have to pay for developers.”
“(AI growth) will mean that a lot of (human) activities will shift to more of a reviewer, and correcting things, and building and focusing on the key issue that differentiates companies and customers.”
Also announced at TechEd was SAP Build Code, a new “pro-code” service that aims to help developers of all skill levels learn generative AI skills faster than ever.
Speaking at a press conference at the event, JG Chirapurath, chief marketing and solutions office for SAP BTP, said he believed this new offering would speed up the entire development process to improve productivity.
“If you look at SAP Build Code, you will see that it is built to empower developers,” he noted, noting that the platform often eliminates the tedious or repetitive tasks that developers need.
“But as always with these technologies, we will actually see more development happening,” Mueller added, “as digitalization is everywhere and all companies will become AI companies, so therefore the demand for good development capacity is virtually unlimited.”
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