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- Hacker News
- Anecdotally, I know several companies that have given the directive of "Use more AI instead of hiring more people". I wonder whether this is part of the story here too?by bucket2015
- This is less of an issue than the headline suggests. I worked for a publicly traded US company remotely. The company was based between Ft. Lauderdale and West Palm Beach Florida. It was a roll of the dice each spring if the CFO would pull the trigger on a travel block for about 6 weeks around spring break when flights and hotels were most expensive. Approvals were available for critical projects. It was only ever about not exceeding a quarterly budget number; nothing else.
- Wait, first they stopped hiring because AI is going to replace everybody. Now they stopped hiring because AI, which was going to replace everybody, costs too much.
You can’t make this stuff up.
by g42gregory - Sometimes buying a tool to make 10 people 15% more effective is a better choice than hiring 1 person.by therealdrag0
- In other words, AI is now driving their budget decisions.by jqpabc123
- TL;DR:
“Under the policy, only Al-related hiring, customer-facing travel and trips directly linked to the company's Al initiatives or mission-critical employee Al training are exempt, reflecting SAP's focus on "be disciplined in how we spend" while expanding its Al capabilities.”
no-paywall: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49222851
by rawland - I would pay to understand what mission critical employee Ai training is that can't be provided in other waysby amarcheschi
- Like their systems aren't shitty enough.by feverzsj
- So they are using AI to run the company, and AI allocated all the money to AI?by gruturo
- Sounds like a paperclip maximizer to me.
Seriously, why the duck aren't they running their own AI systems in house???
by happycube - it may just be actually incredible what they are doing. on the other hand it could also be absolutely insane...by andrekandre
- So will AI be what finally kills SAP, making world a little bit better? ;-)by m4rtink
- Seems like they're doing fine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP#mwAeoby mathfailure
- "Daddy, vodka got more expensive now, does it mean you will be drinking less?"
"No, kids, it means you will be eating less."
- I sure am glad my employer isn’t a drunk daddyby leoh
- Telling that SAP now exfiltrates all your company data to the U.S. AI cartel:by qw2187
- The big risk for these platforms is that AI reduces the cost to switch to another ERP. IF AI can map all of the data between two different competitors, the whole business model is finishedby mikert89
- Maybe but I work for a company that integrates with a lot of ERPs and I don't know why but the rando IT guy who can't get themselves out of a paper bag is still a thing. You'd think AI would help them but man ... doesn't seem like it.by duxup
- That is not what ERPs are used for.
Would love to hear how AI is going to help here. This is like a young engineer thinking the CDC machine they just bought, is going to make Airbus and Boeing obsolete...
by johnbarron - Having worked at some giant firms that heavily depend on SAP, I would think their position as "system of record for procurement/production" would get stronger with AI.
e.g. AI + a good database of what your company does seems like an excellent combination.
by alexpotato - Would a technology famous for hallucinating data often enough, and in many context unable to guarantee it won't assume and hallucinate when it feels "confident enough" despite a robust system prompt, be really considered for a "system of record for procurement/production" usage?
(yes yes RAG exists)
by gruturo - LOL
Although they may internally use LLM, I wanna say said they were not going to allow their core offering to be integrated with LLM
Although maybe they reversed course?
by happyPersonR - The same argument can be made about snowflakes and other providers that handle the data layer. If they can leverage AI in a safe contained environment they would become the clear winnerby elias_t
- I've been impressed so far with Snowflake's offerings of "AI + a good database"by snarfy
- Or AI can be a threat: If AI can spit out good enough special purpose tools a lot of the SAP adaption business goes away. If AI then also assists in data migration the moat goes away.