Author: Peter M. Färbinger, E3 Magazine

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.

The current SAP cloud and licensing model in no way serves to technically and organizationally liberate existing customers, but rather binds them more closely to Walldorf. Those who rely on Rise with SAP without a sound IT strategy, external legal advice and license control risk high costs and permanent dependence on the software giant.

Igor Levit is one of the best-known and most successful piano musicians in the current concert business. He is an ambassador for Steinway & Sons pianos with regular appearances at the Salzburg Festival. A two-hour video documentary about his work and his thoughts is called: No Fear.

SAP customers are under double pressure: they have to operate existing systems stably and manage the transformation towards the cloud and new operating models. For DSAG Austria board member Walter Schinnerer, it is clear that the real challenge lies in the organization.

For existing SAP customers, the urgent question is what is really behind this new glossy term of an autonomous ERP suite and whether it is a genuine technical revolution for users or merely a stock market-driven labeling scam.

Behind the cloudy AI marketing promises of the Walldorf-based software company SAP, a fundamental paradigm shift is currently taking place that will massively change the future of business data processing. LLMs naturally fail with abap tables.

For the German-speaking SAP user group (DSAG), it is unacceptable that SAP severely restricts the use of APIs for undocumented purposes, for systematic mass data extractions and for interaction with autonomous generative AI systems from third-party providers.

SAP CEO Christian Klein propagates the dawning age of Agentic AI, in which autonomous AI agents as digital „super workers“ no longer just passively answer questions, but independently analyze, orchestrate and execute complex end-to-end processes in Composable ERP.

Anyone who believes they can successfully implement an S/4 migration with the lift-and-shift concepts brownfield or greenfield is mistaken. Pure code conversion - even in SAP Clean Core - leads to strategic failure. Nova Intelligence relies on understanding instead of conversion: Cleanfield and Composable ERP for sustainable transformation.

In the new Abap Cloud world, unlimited direct access to database tables, the local file system or the kernel of the application server is strictly prohibited. For existing SAP customers, this development doctrine results in a painful and expensive refactoring process.

The former pioneer of standard business software seems to have lost its innovative compass. Hana, cloud, AI, qubits - what adds value to ERP?