Europe’s largest software company is redistributing product and engineering responsibilities in its second top-level reorganisation of the year, with AI at the centre.
When a company reorganises its leadership once in a year, it is housekeeping. When it does so twice, with the same word at the centre of both, it is a strategy under pressure.
SAP is dividing up oversight of its product and engineering functions and handing more of it to its most senior executives, the second top-level reshuffle this year at Europe’s largest software company, as it scrambles to keep pace with rivals moving fast on artificial intelligence.
The latest changes distribute responsibility for product across the top of the house, drawing AI oversight closer to chief executive Christian Klein and the company’s operating leadership rather than leaving it parcelled out lower down.
The aim, in the language SAP has used around the move, is to shorten the distance between the people setting AI strategy and the teams building it, on the theory that the gap is where momentum gets lost.
