SAP without Christian Klein

The SAP share price is official confirmation that SAP needs a new CEO. Christian Klein has neither the knowledge nor the conviction to turn the cloud company into an AI company. Why? The strategy is wrong: even the most innovative IT add-ons and acquisitions will not turn a very profitable and useful truck into a Formula 1 racing car. SAP CEO Christian Klein argues eloquently for the acquisitions and takeovers, but this actionism is merely repair service behavior.

Nobody is asking SAP, the leading ERP group, to come up with better AI concepts than OpenAI and Anthropic. I already wrote here many months ago: Cobbler, stick to your last! Naturally, SAP CEO Christian Klein finds himself in an „innovator's dilemma“ (see Professor Clayton M. Christensen). But because Klein cannot find a way out of this paradigm, he should step down: With his loudly proclaimed vision of the „Autonomous Enterprise“, the SAP CEO is currently trying to save the ERP world market leader into a new era through the massive use of artificial intelligence, but a closer look reveals that this is precisely where a fatal strategic failure according to the theory of Professor Clayton M. Christensen (1952 to 2020) lies.

With his concept of the innovator's dilemma, the renowned Harvard economist coined a fundamental principle that now hangs over Walldorf like a sword of Damocles: if a leading company attempts to develop a new, disruptive technology (autonomous enterprise) only to the extent that it meets the traditional requirements of existing customers in established markets, it is almost certain to fail.

It is precisely this dangerous trap of inertia that Christian Klein is currently caught in with his AI plans, as he is not using artificial intelligence to radically reinvent the classic ERP system in an open-ended way, but is merely putting it on top of the old, established software architectures as functional icing to protect the highly profitable, historically grown license and cloud business. Instead of allowing a genuine disruption that might even cannibalize its own business model, in which autonomous AI agents could completely replace traditional, manually programmed ERP software, Klein is forcing AI into the rigid corset of the traditional SAP world so as not to scare off existing customers and reassure the financial markets with the bold mantra „All-in on AI“.

From the perspective of Clayton M. Christensen's theory, the concept of the „Autonomous Enterprise“ is therefore deeply endangered because SAP, as the lumbering top dog, is reluctant to fundamentally challenge its own ERP system monopoly. While agile AI start-ups and hyperscalers are hollowing out the software industry from the bottom up with completely new, decentralized AI architectures, Christian Klein is sacrificing the true revolutionary power of artificial intelligence in favour of short-term margins and outdated ERP concepts (S/4 Hana), which means that the warning prediction of the Innovator's Dilemma inevitably threatens to come true for the Walldorf-based company.