SAP's Gina Vargiu-Breuer: AI agents are already making decisions, so who’s accountable?

For SAP Chief People & Culture Officer Gina Vargiu-Breuer, rolling out AI is the easy part. Getting people to embrace it is the real work.

Speaking to UNLEASH Editor, John Brazier, Vargiu-Breuer says everything ultimately comes down to “how much are people embracing the change.” That is why SAP’s AI adoption push is “not a campaign or a project,” but a mindset, and why 80% of its 112,000 employees will have gone through hands-on AI bootcamps by March 2027.

As SAP turns itself into an autonomous enterprise, she argues that agents are “already taking decisions.” That makes it “super important to be extremely clear who’s accountable for what” between humans and agents, which takes major role redesign, transparency and change management.

The shift is reaching the C-suite too. Because agents “work end to end,” she says there is “no organizational boundary anymore,” and leaders must move out of functional silos towards enterprise orchestration.

At UNLEASH 2026 in Paris, Vargiu-Breuer talks through why SAP measures employee confidence alongside AI adoption, why peer-to-peer influence beats top-down messaging, and why integrating agents with human teams in a new operating model is her biggest challenge for the year ahead.

Watch the full interview: