Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 3/5

Herzig: Large language models are not designed for predictive enterprise tasks

Philipp Herzig · SAP: Bringing the ‘Operating System’ of a Company into the AI Era with CTO Philipp Herzig · Apr 23, 2026 · at 26:43

Philipp Herzig, CTO of SAP, explains why LLMs cannot easily replace classical machine learning for enterprise tabular predictions.

0:00 / 0:22exact quote · 23.0s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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're language models, right? And they do this phenomenally well. But if you still want to do these predictors where you have to go back to these classical machine learning approaches, right?”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Philipp Herzig

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,…”
Philipp Herzig Apr 23, 2026 ▶ 6:10 SAP: Bringing the ‘Operating System’ of a Company into the AI Era with CTO Philipp Herzig
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.”
Philipp Herzig Apr 23, 2026 ▶ 14:43 SAP: Bringing the ‘Operating System’ of a Company into the AI Era with CTO Philipp Herzig
Opinion
Herzig: Developers never actually adopted test-driven development in practice
“The reality is nobody did it. At least I never did it because it was so much more fun. It was not very popular at the end.”
Philipp Herzig Apr 23, 2026 ▶ 16:16 SAP: Bringing the ‘Operating System’ of a Company into the AI Era with CTO Philipp Herzig
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…”
Philipp Herzig Apr 23, 2026 ▶ 21:27 SAP: Bringing the ‘Operating System’ of a Company into the AI Era with CTO Philipp Herzig
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.”
Philipp Herzig Apr 23, 2026 ▶ 9:36 SAP: Bringing the ‘Operating System’ of a Company into the AI Era with CTO Philipp Herzig
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.”
Philipp Herzig Apr 23, 2026 ▶ 18:22 SAP: Bringing the ‘Operating System’ of a Company into the AI Era with CTO Philipp Herzig
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 100 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.