Author: Peter M. Färbinger, E3 Magazine

First, my colleague Christof Kerkmann reported in the *Handelsblatt* on the restructuring of SAP’s Executive Board: CEO Christian Klein plans to focus on AI technology going forward, as Executive Board member Muhammad Alam (Product and Engineering) will be leaving the company in early 2027. Klein is supported behind the scenes by a strategic advisor.

"The Beginning of Better": Christian Klein expressed his hope for an improvement in SAP's difficult situation on the Sapphire stage in Orlando.

SAP is leading its existing customers on a journey of its own accord (autonomously) while they strive to reach the summit with their ERP system.

Anyone who analyzes SAP’s promises regarding the „Autonomous Enterprise,“ the Joule assistant, and autonomous AI agents with the necessary objectivity will inevitably come across a fundamental blind spot in the current AI strategy: hallucinations

The U.S. government’s drastic order to block access to Anthropic’s state-of-the-art AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, for all foreign nationals is serving as a massive, strategic wake-up call for the European SAP community. Following its cloud exit, this long-standing SAP customer now needs an AI exit.

It’s not a bad idea for SAP CEO Christian Klein to design a future ERP user interface based on the „headless“ IT concept. With Joule Work, SAP has laid the groundwork for this. But how does headless technology align with the new SAP API policy?

Existing SAP customers are currently experiencing the same situation as when waiting for their own suitcase at baggage claim at the airport: many beautiful and perhaps valuable suitcases are passing by; the existing customer is waiting in vain for their own suitcase, their own ERP problem solution.

SAP CEO Christian Klein wants to bring the topic of AI closer to the SAP community. He wants to become an AI explainer in the ERP scene, but he treats AI like the cloud: a language problem.

Since the first mention of the round trip problem as a mathematical challenge in 1930, many researchers have dealt with it and developed optimization methods that are also used for other ERP optimization problems. Whether SAP Business AI with Joule has a solution approach for supply chain management here is as yet unanswered.

Things can only get better: At the end of SAP's in-house exhibition Sapphire 2026 in Orlando (USA), the SAP share price on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange is exactly 50 percent below its all-time high of almost 280 euros from last year. What now?

SAP CEO Christian Klein wants to reinvent his global ERP company with AI. But does he understand AI? He is currently copying the old cloud model, as he himself wrote in a guest article in the Financial Times.

The traditional era of enterprise resource planning, or ERP for short, is effectively dead when taking a critical, analytical look at current IT and AI developments, and with it SAP's cloudy marketing concept of the so-called Intelligent Enterprise.