Yahoo Finance SAP CEO on Trump: 'You have to give people a chance'
The CEO of the highest market-cap company on the DAX German stock exchange is optimistic about President Trump.
“Optimism is a free stimulus, and I was born optimistic,” Bill McDermott, CEO of German software giant SAP, told Yahoo Finance at the 2017 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “You have to give people a chance. I think as a businessperson, Donald Trump understands global trade and commerce has to happen. I think there will be good negotiations, I think in the words of the president-elect, maybe ‘better deals,’ but certainly there will be deals, there will be trade, there will be commerce, the world economy will move forward.”
McDermott, who is has been CEO of SAP since 2010 and is the German company’s first American CEO, isn’t buying into concerns about a possible trade war.
On its face, that may seem to contradict some concerns McDermott expressed earlier this week about tariffs in the Trump era. “We obviously don’t want to get into any difficulties on tariffs, we want to create jobs and create economic opportunity,” McDermott told CNBC’s Squawk Box.
SAP aims to create 10,000 new jobs in the US in the next year, which should please Trump and his job creation platform. McDermott also told CNBC that various arms of the US government, from the Department of Defense to the Army and Navy, run on SAP’s technology. “So we feel like we have a hand in the success of the United States.”
The other business theme McDermott was focused on at Davos is machine learning. SAP aims to ramp up its use of machine learning for traditionally human tasks, such as hiring.
“HR departments are constantly matching a job profile to candidates, and humans have a natural bias,” McDermott told Yahoo Finance. “But machines don’t think like that. They just perfectly match the requirements of a job to the human being, and the candidate. So we don’t think that machines, or artificial intelligence, should replace humans, we think machines should help humans make better decisions. We believe that the world should have a digital boardroom running every company.”
SAP says it’s the fastest-growing enterprise cloud company. If McDermott’s optimism proves correct about business and job creation under Trump, look for SAP to continue that growth.
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Daniel Roberts is a writer at Yahoo Finance, covering sports business and technology. Follow him on Twitter at @readDanwrite.
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