Philipp Herzig, CTO of SAP, reflects on historical software development practices and why test-first development failed to gain widespread adoption.
Opinion
Herzig: Enterprise AI adoption gap is widening rather than narrowing
“We also see that the AI adoption in the enterprise is still not where we want to see it, right? Like there's this Gartner curve, right? Where say like there's this AI innovation race, and then there's this AI outcome race, right? Then the gap almost increases,…”
Insight
Herzig: Agentic coding succeeds because outcomes are automatically verifiable
“The problem of why does agent decoding work so well, Sarah, is of course you can verify the outcome, right? You can either say, hey, is the program compiling or are your unit tests, right? Does it work, et cetera.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Herzig: Most enterprise agents will rely on tool calling, not GUI
“I still believe for the most part it will, The majority will live with tool calling, right? And agents running in the background and so on, right? Because you also don't, you know, maybe want to have the browser open all the time. Okay, we can do this with hea…”
Insight
Herzig: Large language models are not designed for predictive enterprise tasks
“Now, if you want to do these predictions, quite frankly, then the challenge is large language models are not made for this, right? The way how they, you know, generate just one token after another, essentially, in a sequence-to-sequence modeling. I mean, They'…”
Insight
Herzig: The era of software requiring manual user intelligence is over
“The time is clearly over where you design software, where the dump software, where the, that requires the intelligence to sit in front of the computer.”
Insight
Herzig: System of Record Data Is Insufficient for Autonomous Enterprise Agents
“If you just look into the system of record today, that data is insufficient for this grand vision that everybody has, that it becomes this autonomous enterprise or like the agency of these agents is increasing right over time.”