In Search of Our Own Roadmap

This motto marks a remarkable turning point in the SAP community’s discourse, as it explicitly does not focus on the next fleeting buzzword or an unverifiable promise of innovation, but rather rejects uncritical technological euphoria and blind activism. In a business reality where digital transformation has long since become the norm, and where migration projects to S/4, the implementation of the Business Technology Platform, and AI initiatives are running in parallel under considerable time and expectation pressures, this assessment takes on a functional urgency. The primary goal of the user association is to free member companies from the role of passive followers through a sober, evidence-based assessment of the SAP product roadmaps, thereby empowering them to become self-determined architects of their own IT architectures.

The necessary demystification of the manufacturer’s marketing begins with a realistic assessment of the actual market readiness of SAP innovations: While SAP is pushing its “cloud-first” doctrine and the integration of artificial intelligence into cloud subscriptions such as Rise or Grow, existing customers encounter significant hurdles in practice, ranging from unpredictable usage fees under BTP credit models to controversial restrictions imposed by the newly enacted SAP API Policy.

Since, according to the DSAG Investment Report, a broad majority of existing SAP customers still rely on S/4 on-premises systems, access to technical advancements must not be denied by contractual restrictions. Added value is only created when AI use cases do not fizzle out as isolated experiments, but rather solve concrete business problems, remain transparent, and do not generate new technical debt or uncontrollable cloud costs.

On the vendor side, SAP outlines the vision of the Autonomous Enterprise as a new ERP target state, in which the traditional Business Suite is to be gradually transformed into an AI-driven, self-sufficient platform. This paradigm relies on the AI assistant Joule, domain-specific AI agents, and the SAP Knowledge Graph on the Business Data Cloud (BDC) to execute end-to-end processes largely autonomously. From a critical perspective, however, this autonomy proves to be a dangerous fallacy when probabilistic language models—without sufficient governance and with poor master data quality—are unleashed upon the relentless precision of the deterministic general ledger.

To break free from the trap of vendor-driven hype cycles, a pragmatic course of action is needed—one that views cloud computing as a flexible foundation and artificial intelligence as a targeted driver of measurable business results. The cloud model is not an ideological dogma, but rather serves as the basis for resilient IT landscapes, the pace of implementation and scope of which must be strictly tailored to the user’s individual business requirements.

In this framework, artificial intelligence serves as an automation accelerator for sound decision-making processes, provided it is operated with complete transparency, full audit trail integrity, and strict human oversight. By defending their data sovereignty, decoupling their core processes, and evaluating innovations based on business criteria, existing SAP customers assert their own territory within the ecosystem and lead their companies into the future with digital sovereignty.