E3 Category: Editor-in-Chief Blog

Subscription or consumption? Buy, rent, or pay based on usage? Following the on-premise era, existing SAP customers are facing an almost insurmountable complexity of fees. The Business Data Complexity (SAP BDC) defined by the user association DSAG is just the tip of the iceberg.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.