SAP Labs opens second campus in Bengaluru with €194 mn investment

The new facility will host 15,000 employees as SAP strengthens its AI-led R&D footprint in India, its largest base outside Germany, aiming to double client productivity

SAP Labs on Tuesday inaugurated its second campus worth 194 million euros in Bengaluru, as the research and development division (R&D) of the German software company doubles down its presence in India at a time when artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the technology landscape. 

The second campus, in the outskirts, complements the existing one in the city’s technology hub and has a capacity of 15,000 people, Sindhu Gangadharan, managing director of SAP Labs India, said while inaugurating the new office space. 

SAP Labs already has about 14,000 employees in Bengaluru and the latest addition would pump up the headcount to about 29,000. Besides this, there are offices in Hyderabad, Pune, and Mumbai. 

 

SAP Labs India is SAP's largest R&D location outside the headquarters in Walldorf, Germany. It is innovating key AI use cases and drivers across the entire solution base, from S/4 HANA to HXM and the latest sustainability suite of solutions. 

 

AI will be at the centre of SAP’s product portfolio as the company attempts to not only improve client efficiency and productivity, but also that of its own developers.

 

“Every developer will be an AI developer and they need the talent to understand deep domain expertise,” added Gangadharan.

 

Thomas Saueressig, board member of SAP SE, said that 75 per cent of SAP engineers have been given dedicated AI training, while 90 per cent use some AI tools to improve their productivity.

 

SAP Labs told Business Standard earlier this year it was looking to double its customers' productivity gains to 40 per cent from 20 per cent, by using generative AI by the end of this year.

 

For SAP Labs, 40 per cent of its global R&D workforce is based out of India, while 25 per cent of the global patents are filed from here. It works with professors to help employees write technical papers or make entries in science journals.

 

SAP, Saueressig said, is also building its own tabular foundational model based on its data, which will complement large language models from Open AI, Mistral, Anthropic, and others.