India tops APAC region in embedded AI revenue in 2024, says SAP executive

Subramanian Ananthapadmanabhan, Chief Revenue Officer – Business Technology Platform, APJ, SAP

India emerged as the largest market for German enterprise software giant SAP in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region in 2024, both in terms of revenue and adoption of embedded artificial intelligence (AI) solutions, a senior company official has told Moneycontrol

Over the past 12 months, SAP has built more than 210 AI and generative use cases, which have been deployed for nearly 34,000 customers globally, Subramanian Ananthapadmanabhan, Chief Revenue Officer–Business Technology Platform, APJ, SAP said

“India is number one in APAC in terms of adoption of embedded AI. We have a good market share in India for SAP. The country leapfrogged the world in terms of technology adoption,” Ananthapadmanabhan said on the sidelines of SAP Now AI Tour in Mumbai on April 23.

In terms of revenue, India stood number one last year inside the APAC region in embedded AI, he said. SAP follows January-December financial year.

At present about 98 percent of large Indian enterprises, including Mahindra & Mahindra, Asian Paints, Wipro, Infosys, Vahdam Teas, Ola, Wakefit, DeHaat and Jaquar, are SAP customers.

Speaking at the event, Simon Davies, President, SAP APAC, said, “Not just in APAC, but also globally, India is one of our growth engines. We see the fastest adoption of public cloud and by the mid-market segment. A lot of that is driven by the passion of the organisations here.”

The growth of the new economy in India will bring tremendous opportunities, offering SAP a chance to look for ways to infuse AI for huge productivity uplifts, he said.

Driving productivity gains

Ananthapadmanabhan said SAP’s agentic AI co-pilot Joules for Business and Joules for Consultants were trained on 3 terabytes of community information, equivalent to about 250 million lines of ABAP codes.

ABAP is a fourth-generation programming language developed by SAP.

“It is actually like having a walking, talking, real life SAP consultant,” he said. A third variant of the AI assistant is Joules for Developers, which converts functional requirements into code.

“In terms of productivity gains, the AI assistant enables about 8 percent reduction in the time taken for the overall implementation. Additionally, it shaves off about 40 percent of the time taken by a consultant to analyse SAP’s ABAP code,” Ananthapadmanabhan said.

Customers such as Mahindra and Mahindra have implemented AI into eight use cases in their HR function.

For AI embedded in learning and development, in recruitment, goal creation use cases, SAP is seeing that AI infusion has saved about 70 percent of customers’ time.

SAP offers a platform-based model for customers to pick and integrate the third-party large language model (LLM) of choice such as ChatGPT and DeepSeek's R1 model.