SAP Labs India now houses 40% of the company’s global R&D staff and builds over 80% of its AI agents, led out of its Bengaluru centre.

Nearly 40% of SAP’s entire global R&D workforce is now based in India. Even more striking, more than 80% of the company’s AI agents, the automated tools meant to handle everyday business tasks like finance and procurement, are being developed right here.

Roughly a quarter of SAP’s worldwide patents also trace back to Indian engineers. SAP Labs India was set up in 1998.

Today it employs around 18,000 people, making it SAP’s largest R&D hub outside Germany, bigger than its operations in China, Brazil, and even the United States.

The centre’s role has shifted a lot over the years. It started out simply executing plans drawn up abroad.

Now it houses global product managers, chief architects, and AI leaders who help decide what SAP builds next, not just how it gets built. One example shows how far that shift has gone.

When SAP’s CEO announced that its AI assistant, Joule, would handle 80% of repetitive business tasks across the company’s software, it was the Bengaluru team that delivered on it, redesigning enterprise workflows for AI within a year.

This momentum has continued through 2026. In May, SAP unveiled AI Foundation, described as the operating system underpinning every Joule AI agent, built on a knowledge base covering over 452,000 data tables.

Then in June, SAP Labs India launched its 2026 Startup Studio cohort, a six-month accelerator backing 16 startups working on enterprise AI, robotics, and quantum-safe security, marking ten years of the programme.

Together, these moves point to India’s growing weight in shaping SAP’s AI strategy well beyond just writing code for it.

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