Presenting My Bachelor's Thesis on CodeAct at SAP AICON
Today, I presented my bachelor’s thesis at the SAP AICON conference in Walldorf and shared my research on CodeAct — an AI agent approach that enables agents to execute all actions through code instead of individual JSON-based tool calls.
As part of my thesis, I evaluated the CodeAct approach, proposed by researchers from Apple and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2024, by developing a CodeAct agent prototype with LangGraph and SAP technologies. The agent was tested in a self-designed procurement process that included unforeseen events such as supply shortages.
The results of my thesis showed that CodeAct can offer significant advantages in terms of efficiency, reliability, and transparency. At the same time, code execution can also introduce serious security risks, including data loss and remote code execution. In one test, the CodeAct prototype deleted all orders from the database. A recently reported incident at PocketOS, where an AI coding agent deleted the company’s database in just nine seconds, shows that this risk is not only theoretical.
I would like to thank Prof. Dr. Klaus Kasper from the Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences (h_da) for his valuable feedback and support throughout the writing process and for taking over the main review. I would also like to thank Prof. Dr. Marcus Zinn for taking over the second review and also for his helpful feedback. Overall, I truly enjoyed my dual bachelor’s degree in IT security at h_da and SAP over the past three years. It gave me a strong, practice-oriented foundation in computer science and IT security.
A big thank you also goes to the SAP AI Agent Foundation, especially Benjamin Stoeckhert, for enabling this exciting research opportunity, and to Felix Hausberger for the great support, many code reviews, and valuable software engineering insights. I am also grateful to all the teams I had the chance to work with during my practical phases over the past three years.
I will now continue with a dual master’s degree through the SAP STAR program in the AI Agent Foundation, while studying deep learning, large language models, and other exciting AI topics at Technische Universität Darmstadt over the next two years.
With this background in both AI and security, I look forward to contributing to the development of AI agents that are not only powerful but also secure.