India will be the skill capital of the world: SAP India MD Kulmeet Bawa

SAP Indian Subcontinent president and managing director, Kulmeet Bawa

India will be the skill capital of the world and a young population offers the country a competitive edge, Kulmeet Bawa, president and managing director, SAP Indian Subcontinent, has said, as global demand for skilled tech workforce rises.

With over 60 percent of the people below the age of 32, Bawa said the country holds certain competitive advantages. “These advantages are here to stay for us for the next four or five decades,” he told Moneycontrol in a recent interview.

For SAP, the Indian market was important, especially for research and development (R&D), as it provides a skilled workforce at a better cost productivity, he added.

Bawa was in conversation with Moneycontrol at the SAP TechEd 2023, where the company rolled out a series of generative AI tools aimed at empowering developers. These tools included SAP Build Code solutions, vector engine on SAP HANA Cloud and a generative AI hub on SAP Business Technology Platform.

The GenAI hub slated to roll out by December this year will help developers create AI-based applications choosing relevant large language models (LLMs) from multiple ones available.

"About 40 percent of our R&D workforce is here (in India). We touch almost every product whether you look at sustainability, or anything futuristic like GenAI Hub, Joule and so on,” said Bawa.

Joule is a natural-language generative AI co-pilot, launched in September this year, which is embedded throughout SAP’s cloud enterprise portfolio.

Bawa also added that the Indian market was the fastest growing in terms of companies in cloud adoption. "The pace of growth is in triple digits compared to other markets, which have a growth rate of 20 percent. So naturally, this becomes an important market,” he said.

In India, SAP has a presence in the enterprise, mid-market and startup segment. According to Bawa, there were about 50 unicorns among the over 100 startups that the company was serving.

Recognising the potential, the German enterprise application software giant has taken various measures to facilitate this growth.

Moneycontrol reported in September that SAP, having its largest R&D centre with over 15,000 people, is looking to double its AI talent base across domains. The company is opening up new offices in Bengaluru and Pune.

During his India visit in February, SAP global CEO Christian Klein told the media that the company was planning to double down on investment in India over the next five years in terms of increasing team size and hirings.