I feel a bit apprehensive about the upcoming Global Employee Meeting. Our results were good and beat market expectations and I know I should not feel this way. We have a lot of positive cash flow and can sustain good growth if we continue the trajectory. This is one of those times where smart CEOs and executive boards and supervisory boards (elected) would try to invest in more headcount to get an edge over our competitors. But I know that will not happen because
1) The biggest SAP commitment is to create enough cash flow for executive board bonuses and group executive bonuses
2) The second biggest SAP commitment is to create enough cash flow for share buybacks. SAP intends to spend up to 2.6 billion € (without incidental acquisition costs) in the period from 5 February 2026 until 27 July 2026 at the latest. https://www.sap.com/investors/en/stock/share-buy-back/2026.html
3) The third biggest SAP commitment is to create enough cash flow for the AI fairy tale. I call this is fairy tale because the total cost of AI solutions, third party development to make those solutions work for SAP employees, operating costs related to AI and opportunity costs when having to fix AI mistakes is very high.
In fact, there are reports that AI costs more than the humans they are intending to replace. But compared to humans, they do not have "workers rights" and can be easily exploited at the cost of our environment.
4) Lack of empathy in our executive board members and elected supervisory board representatives. Every earnings call and global employee call has one or two speakers apologizing for something derogatory they said towards employees. This doesn't matter because they go right back to treating us like dirt again.
5) Commitment to fake HR plans. The new HR under Gina scrapped all previous HR programs and want to reinvent the wheel again. What this means is that they want to reduce workers rights and reduce employee benefits. And they create a lot of busy work for themselves to talk about but this work has no impact or has a negative impact on the SAP culture. We had HPOM and then Performance Management. God knows what atrocity they are brewing now.
This and many other reasons make me apprehensive about the Global Employee Meeting. I am expecting layoff news either as a big number or a small percentage every year. I wish we had the courage to fight back by giving low unfiltered scores. I wish we had more courage to elect better supervisory board members and not the same ones again and again because they have shown themselves to be executive friendly and not employee friendly. I wish SAP had a real long term strategy that went beyond "we are copying others in AI slop". I wish I didn't have to worry about having a job when I work for a company that is actually making a decent profit.
How are you all feeling about the Global Employee Meeting?