SAP says it is ushering in a new era of agentic AI, one where agents don’t just learn a business, but help run it.

This week at its TechEd conference, the company is announcing new tools in its SAP Business AI Platform that will extend AI agents’ capabilities, give them richer, more enterprise-specific data and context, and beef up governance controls so they can be rolled out safely across enterprise workflows.

“There used to be a time where AI assistants or interfaces could do a couple queries, and you had to get the query more or less right,” SAP chief AI officer Jonathan von Rüden told CIO. “And then if you asked three, four questions, eventually it would say, ‘I can’t go that far.’ Now that constraint isn’t really there anymore.”

New orchestration layer

SAP has introduced new capabilities in its AI-driven workspace Joule Work and its AI no-code/pro-code agent building environment, Joule Studio.

Joule Studio will now be natively integrated with Joule Work, giving users a single build layer. They will be able to describe their intent, and the system will orchestrate the right agents, apps, and data. Joule Work is built on the SAP Business AI Platform, which provides context, data, and governance.

“Effectively, business users get a coding agent into their hands, but they don’t know it is one, so they come up with all kinds of very, very interesting use cases,” von Rüden said.

SAP has put a good deal of R&D effort into graduating from conversations to a generative UI to “step-by-step” replace classic UIs, he noted. “You don’t need those anymore, you can have them tailor made per person.”

A new orchestration layer in Joule Work will support more complex, multi-step workflows. Beyond working across SAP environments, agents will be able to plug into external systems, data, and tools via Modern Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent2Agent (A2A) Protocol.

Further, Joule Studio will be more tightly integrated with SAP Business Data Cloud so that builders can access various data products across SAP, and users across different teams will be able to collaborate on agents while customizing them to their different roles. These shared environments will have role-based access, and developers will be able to design and run n8n workflows, test pre-deployment in built-in sandboxes, and perform offline evaluations.

Governance, debugging tools

The company also announced that the SAP Knowledge Graph will now have the ability to pull data from both SAP and non-SAP sources, while interoperability tools will allow third-party agents to securely invoke Joule Agents through a governed gateway. This will enable safe collaboration between agents from different providers, SAP said.

New AI capabilities in the SAP Integration Suite will provide tools that analyze bugs, flag anomalies, simplify schema setups, manage GitHub integrations, perform core Git operations, standardize communications, and automate processes across platforms like Gmail, Microsoft Excel, and Salesforce Service Cloud.

From a governance perspective, a new SAP Enterprise AI Gateway will consolidate authentication, policy enforcement, routing, monitoring, usage tracking, and auditing, giving users the ability to view and govern all traffic and interactions. Joule Studio also has new observability and administrative controls, and a new Governance Agent will help companies comply with the EU AI Act.

The Enterprise AI Gateway will bring “enterprise-grade governance to AI interactions” in one control plane, SAP said.

SAP is rolling out Joule Work and the various new Joule Studio features in phases, and general availability for SAP Enterprise AI Gateway and the new SAP Knowledge Graph capabilities are planned for Q1 2027.

Accessing hundreds of assistants for enterprise workflows

With Joule Work and Joule Studio, users can immediately customize a skill load, von Rüden said, and can easily build a reusable dashboard. “Now they have these standard backend connections to SAP.”

For instance, he explained, say a user wants to plan deliveries for the next six weeks. They can pull in data from Jira and GitHub, but also overlay that with data from project planning. “I crunch all of this up in completely natural language, and with out of the box UIs, I can see whether I can actually deliver on what I’ve planned over the next six weeks,” he said.

If a user likes something they co-designed with AI, they can tell it to persist that workflow as a skill. “I can share it back with other colleagues, and that becomes a very powerful workflow,” von Rüden said. “I’m not queuing for eight months in the IT backlog.”

With Joule Work, users have access to 40 specific assistants that can orchestrate hundreds of agents beneath. These include, for example, billing, campaign, enterprise architecture, case management, or HR operations assistants.

“Customers can map these assistants to actual personas,” von Rüden said. Then, assistants can be connected to other relevant assistants (like accounts payable and accounts receivable). “We have one central place where they can exchange trust, and we can secure everything, do policy enforcement.”

Essentially, the right integrations can support near-infinite iteration in AI systems, von Rüden asserted.

New data tools, Tabular foundation model

Also at TechEd this week, SAP is introducing new ontology tools, lakehouse capabilities, and governance and admin controls to take AI from “intent to trusted execution.” The company is building on its recent acquisition of Dremio and an expanded partnership with Databricks to unify data, simplify its management, and support faster contextual insights.

The company is also infusing AI into RISE with SAP, its subscription-based service that helps enterprises transition from on-premises enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to the cloud. Customers will get AI-assisted implementation guidance, best practices, roadmaps, onboarding, and assessment, alignment, and business mapping tools.

Finally, SAP has announced its latest tabular AI model, SAP-RPT-2.0, which will go beyond classification and regression to anomaly and outlier detection and AI-powered analysis. These capabilities will reduce manual engineering and help customers predict values across business metrics for forecasting purposes. Customers will be able to use SAP-RPT-2.0 through the SAP Integrated Business Planning platform.

von Rüden said that the model is being used for “so many wild use cases,” ranging from running small business loans and performing financial forecasting to the classification of astronaut health by NASA.

SAP professionals can now renew their certifications through AI-based roleplays. The new service builds on SAP’s revamp of its certification program last year, shifting the focus from rote learning of facts towards real-world use cases.

“The evolution of Stay Certified reflects a broader shift already taking place across SAP Certification: moving beyond assessing what someone knows toward validating how they can apply that knowledge. AI-powered roleplays bring that principle into the annual certification renewal experience,” the company said in a blog post announcing the new option.

The AI-based scenarios across more than 100 certifications simulate customer interactions with a defined knowledge goal. “The scenarios are grounded in content reflecting the latest SAP product releases, helping learners demonstrate applied, up-to-date knowledge,” SAP said. Immediate feedback is provided to highlight what went well during the roleplay, and what needed improvement.

However, the use of the AI isn’t mandatory: IT pros can still choose to complete a standalone assessment quiz when renewing their certifications.

The process

Users have a 90 day renewal window before certification expiry to complete their recertification. To do so, they must have a subscription to the SAP Learning Hub, at $1452 per user per year, which provides expert-led live sessions to help prepare them, access to hands-on practice systems, four SAP certification exam attempts per year and access to “enablement and assessment to keep certifications valid.” Alternatively, SAP said, users can purchase and retake a certification exam each year.

Yet another option, being piloted at SAP TechEd in Berlin, will be an event-based approach giving eligible users the ability to fulfill their Stay Certified requirement via on-site, hands-on sessions.

A move in the right direction

Analysts are guardedly impressed with the revised approach.

“I think SAP is moving in the right direction, and the ERP industry could have addressed this sooner,” said Robert Kramer, managing partner at KramerERP. “With cloud, AI and automation advancing at their current pace, traditional certification models are struggling to keep up. Knowing the software is one thing. Understanding how to apply it to a customer’s business is another.”

He likes the idea of AI-powered roleplays, because they move certification closer to the application. “Evaluating how someone handles a customer conversation, understands a business problem and recommends a solution is more meaningful than testing whether they memorized product features,” he said.

Frank Dickson, principal analyst at Dickson Research, agreed. The quiz-based approach to renewals was inconsistent, he pointed out: “A credential earned by doing should not be maintained by answering trivia. Airline pilots do not stay current by retaking a written test. They go back into the simulator. That is the right model for cloud software that changes constantly.”

Valence Howden, an advisory fellow at Infotech, added, “SAP’s revised approach to certification is a positive step and a good idea, although it’s not a new or novel approach. In-room and virtual confirmation of the ability to apply training beyond the exam has existed in the industry for a long time, from Cisco certifications a few decades ago to ITIL and other frameworks where top-level certification created scenarios to be solved and addressed in order to validate the ability to apply learning.”

So, he said, “SAP has taken an old but valuable method that will improve the value of their certification, the value of those who achieve it, and provide some assurance around their skills for those who hire them.”

Sanchit vit Gogia, principal analyst at Greyhound Research, agreed. “The AI roleplay is not new to SAP certification,” he said. “It arrived in first-time exams a year ago. What is new is that it has reached renewal, across more than a hundred certifications, and renewal is where SAP’s installed base lives.”

But, he said, “The deeper question is who comes to own the definition of competence, because SAP supplies the AI that helps the consultant, plays the customer, and assesses the exchange. That is the part history will weigh.”

Questions remain

While Kramer approves of the model, he still has reservations about the new testing regime. “A successful roleplay doesn’t necessarily make someone a capable consultant,” he said. “ERP implementations are rarely textbook exercises. They involve decades of customer processes, customizations, industry requirements, questionable data and competing business priorities. Sometimes the best recommendation is not to implement the latest capability, but to address the customer’s readiness first.”

And, he added, “there’s also the question of governance and accountability. Who decides what counts as a correct response? How are assessments validated? What happens when the AI gets it wrong? These questions matter when professional credentials and customer confidence are at stake.”

Dickson, too, has concerns. “The umpire is now an algorithm. Every roleplay is graded by AI, so the strike zone has to be the same for every batter,” he said. “SAP has not said how scoring is calibrated, audited, or appealed. Two consultants giving the same answer should get the same result. Staying certified also requires an SAP Learning Hub subscription, according to SAP’s own FAQ. SAP sells the training and grades the test. That makes transparency on scoring more important, not less.”

SAP is right to test whether certified people can still apply what they know, he noted, and the roleplay is a good simulator. “But a simulator still needs a fair, transparent grader,” he said.

He also has questions about the testing methodology. “Last fall’s exams allowed candidates to use AI tools,” he said. “The announcement does not say what is permitted during a roleplay. If AI assistance is allowed, the roleplay partly measures how well someone works with an assistant. That may be perfectly fine. SAP should simply say so.”

Kramer, too, is looking for more detail. “I support the direction, but I would recommend SAP provide metrics that AI-powered certification produces better professionals, not just a more efficient certification process,” he said. “If it does, this could help close the ERP adoption gap.”

The legal disputes between Germany’s largest software company, SAP, and the Munich-based process mining specialist Celonis took another turn last week. After the German Federal Cartel Office most recently dismissed a complaint filed by Celonis in July, the Munich I Regional Court ruled entirely in favor of Celonis in a case regarding the infringement of a European patent held by Celonis.

Case No. 7 O 12849/25 concerned patent EP 3 139 274 B1 describing a method for determining a net lead time between process steps using process data stored in a structured manner in main memory (in-memory).

Celonis had filed a lawsuit alleging that the patent was infringed by a feature of the SAP Signavio Process Intelligence software solution — SAP acquired Celonis’s rival Signavio in March 2021.

SAP must cease use and provide information

The court ruling prohibits SAP from offering the patent-protected method in Germany or using it itself. SAP must also provide Celonis with information regarding the extent to which it has infringed the patent since April 22, 2020, including details on:

• where the patent-infringing processes originated and through which channels they were offered and distributed;
• which customers purchased them, including names and addresses;
• how many access licenses were granted and how much users paid for them;
• for how many users the methods were used per calendar year;
• which other individuals were involved in offering and using the methods.

In addition, SAP must provide a transparent account of the extent of the patent infringements based on its financial figures. The company is obligated to pay appropriate compensation or damages.

“The ruling by the Munich Regional Court confirms our legal position: SAP Signavio’s technology infringes on Celonis’s patent rights. We consistently protect our intellectual property and remain committed to fair competition,” explained a Celonis spokesperson.

SAP says no consequences for its customers

SAP, however, points out that the court ruling pertains to a single, specific feature within SAP Signavio Process Intelligence, not to the product as a whole. SAP Signavio Process Intelligence remains available to customers, according to a company spokesperson.

The spokesperson also dismissed concerns that the ruling could hinder companies’ migration to SAP S/4HANA Cloud. Migrations to SAP S/4HANA Cloud are not affected by this, he said. SAP is working to ensure that there are no disruptions for its customers.

The concern is not entirely unfounded: SAP Signavio is part of Rise with SAP, a SaaS solution from the Walldorf-based company designed to support migration to the S/4HANA Cloud. SAP Signavio’s process mining tools are designed to provide insight into actual process flows and identify inefficiencies and bottlenecks.

SAP will appeal

The Regional Court’s ruling does not mean the matter is by any means settled: As the spokesperson for the Walldorf-based software giant explained, SAP does not share the Munich court’s legal opinion and will file an appeal against the ruling. In addition, SAP has challenged the validity of the patent in question before the Federal Patent Court.

“SAP’s top priority is to ensure that customers are not affected by this. All other issues will be resolved through the appropriate legal channels,” said the spokesperson for the Walldorf-based company.

This article first appeared on Computerwoche on Oct. 13, 2026.

“Claim your ground, lead your business” is the overarching motto of this year’s German-speaking SAP User Group (DSAG) congress — a slogan the organizers say aims to bring SAP’s technological vision in line with the concrete challenges faced by its customers, complete with a striking Western motif.

The congress, in its 27th year, kicked off with a keynote from outgoing CEO Jens Hungershausen, who underscored the theme, telling the more than 6,000 participants that, in a time of constant change, they — as the companies and organizations who depend on their SAP systems to operate — must consciously define their own scope of action. It’s about acting autonomously, finding one’s own pace, taking responsibility, and making well-founded decisions, he said.

Referring to a saying often attributed to Henry Ford, Hungershausen explained there are always three possibilities: Love it, change it, or leave it — a principle that can readily be applied to the SAP ecosystem.

Based on the results of the DSAG investment survey from early 2026, Hungershausen outlined the decision-making dilemmas many user companies currently face.

Unclear added value of S/4HANA migrations

First, there’s the end-of-maintenance dilemma for customers of older SAP versions: According to the survey, 54% of the companies still use SAP ECC or even SAP Business Suite, even though standard maintenance for SAP ECC expires at the end of 2027. This deadline forces many companies to migrate to S/4HANA, often creating a conflict between unclear business benefits and high investment costs, according to Hungershausen.

At the same time, questions remain around the appropriate operating model. SAP’s preferred approach is the cloud — specifically the public cloud. However, when it comes to S/4HANA, this currently plays a minor role for DSAG companies.

“For us at DSAG, one thing is clear: Cloud is the future. In reality, however, S/4HANA On-Premise and hybrid architectures are the everyday reality for many of our members, and SAP has to accept that,” Hungershausen said.

The DSAG’s corresponding demand to SAP: Key innovations must not be reserved exclusively for cloud customers.

Here, Hungershausen described SAP’s announcement at Sapphire — that selected AI scenarios would also be available to SAP ECC and S/4HANA On-Premise customers as part of Rise with SAP — as merely a first step in the right direction. Companies using S/4HANA locally also pay maintenance fees and can therefore expect a corresponding level of service, he pointed out — especially considering the maintenance commitments extending until 2040.

“We expect economic fairness, meaning fair, transparent, and comprehensible costs and licensing models. And that without constant changes and impractical metrics,” the full-time MEGA CIO demanded.

DSAG

AI between gold rush and reality

Another topic concerning SAP users is artificial intelligence. At this year’s Sapphire conference, the Walldorf-based company announced its “Autonomous Enterprise” vision, in which customers’ business processes would be largely controlled independently by agents.

From DSAG’s perspective, SAP’s vision points in the right direction; however, its implementation still needs to prove itself in everyday customer use.

“The technology for this exists. Yet the gap between vision, available technology, and practical application is widening,” Hungershausen explained. For user companies, therefore, the crucial factor is not how big the next innovation promise is, but rather which solutions can be used productively, securely, and economically.

“AI, gen AI, and automation solutions must be measured by whether they support robust use cases, actually improve business processes, and can be integrated into existing SAP and non-SAP landscapes without disproportionate effort,” said the DSAG chairman.

AI is not yet being used across the board among surveyed organizations. According to the DSAG’s investment report, 43% of respondents had implemented AI use cases when surveyed in January. The vast majority of these were based on non-SAP solutions.

“Companies are simply doing a better job of providing easy access to AI,” Hungershausen said, remarking on those survey results. For further investment decisions, companies need clarity about which SAP solutions are available, what level of maturity they have reached, and under what conditions they can be used productively.

“Despite all the technological dynamism, a careful alignment with operational reality is necessary. Product maturity, integration capability, explainability, governance, security, and economic viability must be assessed,” he said.

This also applies to Joule Work and Joule Work Desktop — interesting approaches from the user group’s point of view, although reliable customer experiences with the AI ​​assistants are still pending.

The DSAG chairman reiterated his demand, also in connection with AI, that there should be no link to cloud contracts. The use of artificial intelligence must become easier in existing SAP landscapes; a restriction to cloud contracts is not an option for DSAG.

In terms of data quality — a prerequisite for successful AI projects — SAP fares better. The company is consistently expanding its portfolio in this area, explained Hungershausen, referring to the acquisitions and investments in Prior Labs, Dremio, and Reltio. SAP is pursuing a clear goal here: a complete value chain for the enterprise environment, from clean master data in a clear business context to AI results that are comprehensible.

But for this to generate sustainable added value, the announcements would need to be based on mature solutions featuring clear, reliable roadmaps, Hungershausen said. Transparency regarding technical and economic dependencies, implementation costs, and licensing models is essential. Solutions must reduce the complexity of system landscapes, not increase it.

Reduce complexity

“Complexity in the SAP environment is part of our daily routine,” Hungershausen noted. However, complex system landscapes generally lead to higher costs — for example, through increased operational and testing efforts, reduced flexibility and responsiveness, dependence on personnel with specialized knowledge, or security risks arising from complex attack surfaces. In addition, there would be more complex licensing models and more elaborate data management.

The shared task of SAP, its partners, and its customers is therefore to reduce complexity rather than create new complexity, according to the DSAG chairman. “SAP has created a good foundation for this with its AI North Star architecture and suite capabilities. However, there is still room for improvement, for example, in the area of ​​document management,” he added.

In general, the DSAG demands a reliable transformation path from SAP that includes employees and doesn’t overwhelm organizations.

“The gap between vision, existing solutions, and real customer value must close. It must not widen further,” said Hungershausen. He recalled SAP CEO Christian Klein’s promise at the 2023 DSAG annual congress not to leave any customer behind: “That’s exactly what we expect.” At the same time, user companies themselves must define their strategy and solve fundamental problems instead of constantly fighting symptoms.

The guiding principle: “Fix the system, not the symptom.”

SAP is continuing its acquisition spree to help its enterprise customers address what it sees as one of the key challenges around scaling AI: giving Joule agents the appropriate context they need to reason across enterprise data and systems.

The enterprise software giant, late on Tuesday, said that it was signing an agreement to acquire Ghent-based AI startup TechWolf to augment its SuccessFactors HCM platform by giving its AI agents a more detailed understanding of how employees work and what skills they have.

The startup’s central offering is a data model called context graph for work, which it builds by using an AI model after analyzing data from HR and business systems. The graph creates a continuously updated view of the work employees perform and the skills they use, and connects that information with jobs, workforce requirements, and external labor-market data.

For SAP, that graph will serve as a grounding layer and provide additional context for Joule AI agents, allowing them to reason across skills, tasks, and workforce requirements when handling enterprise use cases such as skills-based hiring, workforce planning, and role redesign, the company said in a statement.

For enterprises, the additional context is likely to result in more accurate workforce-related agent responses, potentially reducing token consumption and, in turn, the cost of deploying workforce agents, the company added.

Earlier this year in March, SAP acquired Reltio, a master data management platform, to help enterprises unify and harmonize data across SAP and non-SAP systems, in turn making it easy for its AI agents with the context they need to reason across information spread across different systems.

Later in May, the company announced plans to acquire Dremio, an agentic lakehouse provider, to further help enterprises bring together data from different sources and make it available for AI workloads, giving its agents access to the data and context needed to reason across enterprise information.

While Reltio and Dremio address the context problem for SAP from the data side, TechWolf extends that approach to HCM.

However, there is a difference in how these acquisitions are being integrated into SAP’s portfolio. While Reltio and Dremio have been folded into SAP’s broader data platform, TechWolf, at least for now, will continue to operate independently, allowing it to serve both SAP and non-SAP customers while its technology is integrated with SuccessFactors and Joule.

TechWolf’s acquisition is expected to close by December this year, SAP said.

SAP isn’t alone in making acquisitions to address the context problem around enterprise AI.

Its CRM-focused rival Salesforce acquired Informatica in November last year to strengthen its Agentforce platform with data management, governance, metadata, and lineage capabilities, giving AI agents access to trusted enterprise data and the business context needed to reason and act across different systems.

Similarly, ServiceNow completed its acquisition of Moveworks in December last year, adding enterprise search, an AI assistant, and a reasoning engine to its platform to help AI agents access information spread across enterprise applications.

Workday, an HCM-focused rival, too, acquired Sana in November last year to combine its AI-powered search, agents and learning capabilities with Workday’s data and context around people and money, creating what the company described as a horizontal intelligence layer across the enterprise.

It later agreed to acquire Pipedream in November to connect Workday’s people and finance data to more than 3,000 business applications, allowing AI agents to retrieve data and execute tasks across the systems where work happens.

SAP has launched new AI agents and assistants across multiple domains at its SAP Connect event, saying that its October update is fulfilling the promises it made around its vision of the Autonomous Enterprise at Sapphire in May.

The SAP Autonomous Enterprise comprises capabilities in Joule Work and SAP Autonomous Suite, built on the SAP Business AI Platform. The assistants and agents, as well as Joule Studio and Joule Work, will be offered as SAP-managed products via the SAP for Me portal; their general availability begins this month.

Like many other vendors, SAP is turning its agents into a front end for its products.

While Joule used to be just a natural language-based chat client, its scope has expanded, said Manoj Swaminathan, president and chief product officer, SAP Autonomous Suite. “Joule Work now becomes one harmonized experience for anything and everything that the users can interact with, with agents backing it as part of the autonomous suite, fueled and powered by the platform,” he said.

Users can still use the traditional SAP interface if they wish to.

“Systems-of-record-based applications still will be there, but they are now provided with these agentic experiences as well as AI on apps,” he said, “so that if a customer chooses to, they can now take advantage of them either in a semi-autonomous way or a fully autonomous way.”

SAP said that Joule Work is already live with 110,000 employees within the company, and claims 20% productivity gains across finance, HR, and procurement.

At the conference, SAP showcased SAP Autonomous Suite capabilities in finance, where it can automate revenue recognition, disclosures, and trade compliance; in supply chain, where planners “can turn multi-hour disruptions into one-click resolutions across planning, manufacturing and logistics;” as well as in HR, procurement, and customer experience.

Cloud ERP updates

The latest release of the SAP-managed public cloud ERP offers deeper integration across SAP Autonomous Suite. SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition now integrates with SAP Ariba and SAP Sales Cloud solutions, while links to SAP Taulia, SAP Subscription Billing, and SAP SuccessFactors will be made available before year end.

Even SAP’s on-premises offering, Cloud ERP Private, is getting the managed AI services treatment, with new integrations with Joule all delivered and maintained by SAP. It is currently available through the SAP Early Adopter Care program, with general availability planned by year-end.

Analysts displayed varying levels of enthusiasm about the announcements.

Thomas Randall, research lead at Info-Tech Research Group, was unimpressed. “SAP Connect is not giving us any breakthrough moments,” he said. “Microsoft, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Oracle, and the hyperscalers have already established comparable assistants, agent studios, multi-agent orchestration, model choice, and governance capabilities. SAP’s announcements are best understood as fast-following AI technology for business-process suites.”

However, he does see potential. “SAP’s opportunity to pull ahead lies in its positioning AI as a controlled execution layer for back-office operations,” he noted. “Few vendors can match its combination of process depth, transactional authority, industry-specific configuration, and installed footprint. This gives SAP a distinct advantage: its systems are already trusted to move money, adjust plans, release orders, and record the resulting business consequences. I look forward to seeing this advantage in action.”

Jason Andersen, principal analyst, apps, agents and automation at Moor Insights & Strategy, has a more positive view.

First, he said, SAP is showing that it can deliver as planned on the promises made at Sapphire earlier this year. “Notable are a series of task or role driven agents that will augment common roles in many enterprises such as procurement and supply chain roles,” he said.

And, he added, “There is also the backing of the SAP Business AI Platform, which will help enterprises customize these agents to the specific processes and standards for each company. This is a great way for providers like SAP to embed decades of customer understanding within agents but also enable customers to tune them to suit their needs. While the more specific agents get a lot of attention, I also think that SAP’s advances with Joule Studio and Desktop can help workers deliver SAP capabilities in the context of common business remain notable.”

Risk management

However, independent technology analyst Carmi Levy cautioned that there is a wide gap between plans and reality. “As agentic tools draw ever closer to core organizational workflows, enterprise decision makers face amplified concerns around data integrity, privacy, and accuracy,” he said. “Elevated agentic risks should be a primary concern for SAP shops, while SAP’s third-party integration should raise alarm bells among leaders worried about guardrails being violated across the organization.”

While SAP’s announcement goes into significant detail explaining how tightened protocols around authentication, governance, and identity management ensure agents won’t exceed defined limits, he said, it fails to address agents’ vulnerability to new forms of attack such as model injection that organizations must now deal with.

“Agentic AI is already rewriting the cybersecurity playbook for all enterprises, and vendors owe it to customers to explicitly explain how they intend to mitigate the risk,” he said.

“Automated AI agents will ultimately rewrite how work gets done in the same way earlier technologies, like PCs and smartphones, similarly rewrote the rules of modern work,” he said. “But AI agents introduce enough additional baggage into the equation that handing entire processes over to automation at this fraught moment in their development is hardly the recipe for C-Suite harmony.”

At a Fortune 500 insurer, I watched an AI agent inside the month-end close do exactly what we asked. It posted the recurring accruals. It worked the intercompany exception queue, the reconciliation that normally falls to a staff accountant. And when items would not match, it cleared them to a suspense account within the configured tolerance rather than escalating them to a human. Clearing the queue was the objective. Nobody had defined escalation as success.

Every journal entry carried the controller’s user ID. No one set out to obscure anything. The job step had been mapped to her credentials at implementation, which is how it had been done since the system went live.

Segregation of duties had become a fiction. The control requires a named preparer and a named approver. The agent did both, under one identity: it prepared the entries and it disposed of the exceptions. The record named the controller for each. She had done neither. When internal audit walked those entries the following quarter, they asked her to explain postings she had never seen.

None of this was a model failure. The agent was accurate. It was authorized. Every entry looked clean, which is exactly why nobody caught it.

Vipin Jain

Here is the number that should frame this year. Gartner expects 40 percent of enterprise applications to carry task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026, up from under 5 percent in 2025. Okta finds only 10 percent of organizations have a strategy for managing the agents they are already running. And Deloitte, surveying more than 3,000 leaders across 24 countries, puts mature agentic governance at 21 percent against 74 percent who expect to be using agents within two years.

Adoption is racing. The control model is not. Every one of those agents inherits a permission model built for a person clicking a button, which means the question that matters is no longer whether an agent can do the work. It is whether, when it does, anyone can say who authorized it. McKinsey frames the same shift from the governance side: organizations can no longer concern themselves only with systems that say the wrong thing. They now have to contend with systems that do the wrong thing.

What actually broke?

ERP, CRM and core administration platforms rest on four assumptions so foundational that nobody writes them down: identity, permission, action, receipt. Each one places a named human at the center. An agent breaks all four at once, and none of them repairs itself.

Vipin Jain

Intent. A person submits a bounded request, and the request is the transaction boundary. An agent receives a goal and decomposes it into steps at runtime. On a state eligibility modernization program, we gave an agent one goal: clear the verification backlog. It re-ran electronic verification, and where a federal source returned no match, it advanced the case toward closure and generated the notice. Nobody listed that step. Nobody had to. It is a defensible reading of clear the backlog, and it is precisely what the agent was rewarded for. But a no-match is not a finding of ineligibility. It triggers a reasonable opportunity period, and closure carries notice and appeal rights that attach to a determination, not to a data lookup. The rule that breaks here is least privilege. You cannot scope permissions to an action set nobody enumerated in advance.

Authority. Applications grant entitlement to a person. It is standing and role-based, and that person’s judgment is the unwritten limiter on it. At a specialty retailer, I watched a quoting agent go into Salesforce to compress turnaround at quarter close. The approval matrix was intact: manager above fifteen percent, director above twenty-five. None of it fired. A submission action in the user interface triggers a Salesforce approval process, and the agent wrote to the record through the API. It never submitted. An integration user provisioned with more rights than anyone intended bypassed the validation rules and record locks that would ordinarily catch it.

Salesforce’s own architects are blunt about the mechanism. The client credentials flow, they warn, creates a service-account pattern in which every call runs as a single identity, and both per-user permissions and the audit trail are lost along the way. Their guidance on identity propagation goes further: when an agent calls a downstream service using client credentials, the request carries the agent’s service identity rather than the end user’s, which makes per-user authorization and audit trails impossible.

That approval process was never a security control. It was a workflow convention that humans had no reason to route around.

Logic. Business rules used to be a configuration artifact: versioned, testable, under change control. At a health insurer, I traced one authorization threshold for advanced imaging to three separate homes. Configured in the core administration platform. Routed in the orchestration layer. And written in plain English inside the agent’s instruction, as a sentence somebody added during a sprint. Medical policy tightened the first. Nobody touched the third, because the third is not a configuration item. No change control that clinical policy or compliance has ever seen covers it.

In every payer program I have worked, that drift runs one direction only. An agent cannot lawfully deny since adverse determinations require review by a licensed clinician. So the exposure is silent over-authorization against a threshold the organization believes it already tightened, surfacing months later through a delegated vendor audit or a utilization variance that finance notices before medical management does. Then someone asks the question with no good answer: how long, and how many.

Evidence. The log names whichever credential was presented. That is the insurer’s close, and it is the most measurable of the four failures. The Cloud Security Alliance found that 68 percent of organizations cannot clearly distinguish between human and AI agent activity, even as 73 percent expect agents to become vital to operations within a year.

An agent without a delegation chain is not automation. It is an unsigned transaction.

Table 1. The same failure, four industries

Why didn’t the controls catch it?

Because in every one of these cases, the controls worked as designed. That is the uncomfortable part, and in the programs I advise it is the finding that changes the conversation. This is not a problem the CIO can hand to the security team and consider closed.

Consider the insurer’s segregation-of-duties conflict. It never appeared in the access risk analysis, and the tooling did not fail. Most implementations exclude technical and service accounts from risk-analysis scope entirely, on the reasonable historical assumption that a service account does not exercise judgment. Nobody ever analyzed the account. The conflict was not missed. It was never in view.

Most writing on agent risk assumes an adversary. The OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications, built with input from more than 100 practitioners, catalogs goal hijack and memory poisoning and places Identity and Privilege Abuse third on the list. What I see most often is duller. Nobody attacked the payer. A threshold governed in one of three places simply drifted, and it took a vendor audit to notice.

The pattern holds across all four, and each one breaks a control an auditor already asks about. Intent breaks least privilege. Authority breaks separation of duties. Logic breaks configuration management. Evidence breaks non-repudiation. Those four are the spine of any controls walkthrough, which is precisely why this arrives on the CIO’s desk rather than staying in the security function.

None of these produced a headline. They produced audit findings and rework: a control deficiency to disclose, authorizations to re-adjudicate, cases to reprocess, notices to reissue. That cost lands on the CIO’s budget and the CFO’s certification, not on the security team’s incident log.

The repair is the same in all four cases. Stop letting an agent borrow a person’s credential, and start recording who stands behind it.

Vipin Jain

What has the market already conceded?

What I find most striking this year is not that a vendor shipped something. It is that vendors, standards bodies, regulators and advisers all converged on the same requirement within roughly six months of each other, without coordinating.

Vipin Jain

Microsoft made the human sponsor mandatory. Every agent identity carries a named business owner accountable for it, and if that person leaves, sponsorship transfers to their manager so accountability never quietly disappears. SAP now governs an agent lifecycle that runs from proposed to evaluated to approved to active to retired, with a verification badge controlling which agents are cleared for use. And Okta has moved access decisions out of individual applications and into the identity layer, with AWS, Google Cloud and Salesforce behind the effort.

Google reached general availability this month with the bluntest statement any vendor has made. Its agent identity documentation argues against the service account directly: agent identities are not shared, cannot be impersonated, and permit no long-lived keys. Every action resolves to a cryptographic ID rather than to whoever the credential once belonged to. That is the insurer’s close, described by a hyperscaler as a design flaw to engineer out.

The pattern held into this month. At Black Hat on 4 August, Rubrik unveiled a service that grants an agent access one tool call at a time, minting a short-lived token for each call and eliminating standing permissions outright. Its general manager for AI put the diagnosis in one line: the access models we built for humans were never designed for autonomous actors.

The standards work is further behind, and honest about it. NIST’s National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence opened a concept paper on software and AI agent identity and authorization in February and closed comment in April, explicitly seeking input on agent auditing, non-repudiation and prompt-injection controls. The gap is officially acknowledged. The standard is not written.

Regulators moved in a way most leaders misread. Brussels deferred the EU AI Act’s high-risk obligations in June, pushing them to 2027 and 2028, and the headline everyone absorbed was that the AI Act had been delayed. Half true, and imprecise in a way that matters: the Article 50 transparency duties, including telling people when they are interacting with an AI system, were untouched. They took effect on 2 August and are live now.

The advisory community has landed in the same place. BCG, writing on scaling agents in regulated industries, tells CIOs to define clear approaches to agent identity, authority and accountability: what agents can access, what actions they can take, and how those actions remain traceable. Booz Allen, surveying 105 federal IT and cybersecurity decision makers this spring, found 22 percent who have not determined who bears responsibility when an agent causes an incident.

Read those together and the picture is unambiguous. The identity layer has been rebuilt around delegated, sponsored, per-action authority. The business applications those agents act inside have not moved at all.

The plumbing now encodes accountability. The applications still do not ask for it.

Where should CIOs start?

None of this requires a reorganization. The leaders I see getting ahead are not doing more; they are doing six things in order, on the bounded use cases where they can afford to learn.

1. Inventory the agents. Enumerate every agent acting inside a system of record, the identity it runs under, and its standing entitlements. Only 23 percent of leaders report full visibility into the agents already running in their environment, and most organizations I work with cannot produce that list today, and producing it is usually the moment this becomes real to the executive team.
2. Bind identity to a named human. Retire shared service accounts and borrowed logins. Every agent gets its own identity with a named sponsor who answers for it. This is the change that fixes the insurer’s close because the document header stops naming a bystander.
3. Scope authority per action. Short-lived, time-bound, just-in-time. And move approval enforcement out of the workflow layer into the authorization layer, where an API call cannot walk around it. This is the step I almost never see taken, and it is the one that fixes the retailer.
4. Consolidate the logic. The instruction becomes a configuration item: versioned, evaluated, approved and reviewed alongside the rules engine. If a threshold changes in medical policy, it changes in all three places or it changes in none.
5. Instrument the evidence. The transaction record carries the delegation chain, meaning agent, sponsor, instruction version and model version. Without those four, every incident investigation starts from zero.
6. Graduate autonomy deliberately. Sanctioned, then supervised, then autonomous, with sunset as a real state rather than a euphemism for neglect.

Vipin Jain

The gates between rungs are what make the ladder operational rather than decorative. Sanctioned to supervised requires a named sponsor and a declared scope. Supervised to autonomous requires an evidence record showing the agent stayed inside it. And sunset is not a failure state. It is what happens when an agent stops earning the authority it holds, which most organizations have no process to detect.

Do these in order and autonomy compounds. Skip them and you join the more than 40 percent of agentic projects Gartner expects to be canceled by the end of 2027, undone not by weak models but by escalating cost, unclear value and inadequate risk controls.

The takeaway

The most common strategic mistake I see this year does not look like a mistake. Leaders are granting agents authority inside systems whose architects assumed a human held it, and then treating the resulting mess as a technology problem. It is not. It is the same failure I have watched for thirty years, from trading floors to Medicaid programs: business strategy, IT and organizational culture are not architected to move together, and the technology simply industrializes the gap.

I recommend a reframe most leaders resist at first. Guardrails here are not friction. You can give an agent that proves who authorized it more autonomy, sooner, and with far less anxiety than one that cannot. The delegation chain is what makes acceleration survivable.

So put three questions to your team this week. None of them requires a program to answer, and all three will tell you more than a maturity assessment.

Table 2. Three questions, and what a good answer sounds like

The agent is the new user. Your applications have not been told.

This article was made possible by our partnership with the IASA Chief Architect Forum. The CAF’s purpose is to test, challenge and support the art and science of Business Technology Architecture and its evolution over time as well as grow the influence and leadership of chief architects both inside and outside the profession. The CAF is a leadership community of the IASA, the leading non-profit professional association for business technology architects. 

SAP CEO Christian Klein says in an interview with Fortune that he believes the keyboard may soon have a significantly smaller role in the workplace.

“The end of the keyboard is near,” says Christian Klein, pointing to how quickly voice recognition in today’s major language models has improved.

According to Klein, voice control and AI will replace much of the manual data entry in the company’s own systems within two to three years.

For example, voice should be used to ask analytical questions, start workflows and input information. According to Klein, the basic technology is already there, but the challenge is to put it into practice.

He also believes that companies must use AI across their entire operations to get real benefit from the technology, rather than treating it as an efficiency tool for individual departments.

Broadcom isn’t playing nicely in the European market, according to a new report by the independent monitoring body European Cloud Competition Observatory (ECCO), which rates Broadcom’s status as “critical” in its most recent analysis of cloud competition in Europe.

The company’s conduct has “deteriorated markedly” since October 2025 due to what ECCO calls “continued and escalating” unfair licensing practices, delay tactics and “procedural obstruction” in the European Commission’s antitrust investigation, and “wholly misleading” sovereignty claims in the European market.

“These developments represent a serious and continuing attempt by Broadcom to restructure the market in its favor,” the group claimed. “This is a threat not only to the viability of European cloud infrastructure providers, but to the integrity of EU competition enforcement.”

SAP, meanwhile, is at “amber status,” meaning there are escalating concerns in the European market due to newly-introduced API restrictions and changes to agentic AI licensing that could stifle competition.

Microsoft, for its part, remains in good standing, and has made progress relative to previously-raised concerns.

Grievances against Broadcom

ECCO is made up of members of the Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers of Europe (CISPE), as well as European customer organizations. The group rates providers in its regular reports with by color: Red means no meaningful progress has been made, amber represents stalled progress or barriers to resolution, and green signals significant and sufficient progress made regarding specific issues.

In this latest report, Broadcom sits firmly in the red category. ECCO cited several concerns.

For starters, the group is raising flags around “market-harming actions” taken by Broadcom, notably the abrupt shutdown of its partner program, and new “severe” restrictions to its Bring Your Own License (BYOL) terms.

In January, Broadcom unilaterally terminated its main reseller program for VMware cloud service provider (CSP) partners. The program had allowed European cloud companies to provide virtualization services that are critical to large cloud deployments. Now, they can no longer offer VMware services “under any terms.”

“Essentially, vast swathes of Europe’s cloud ecosystem were, at a stroke, denied access to a crucial product for which there are no immediate alternatives,” ECCO wrote. The group argued that Broadcom is “systematically exploiting” its dominant position, and taking advantage of the fact that its VMware virtualization software is complex to replace.

Switching can be time-consuming and disruptive to business operations, ECCO said: “Re-engineering, even where it is possible, is a multi-year and multimillion Euro project.”

The group also pointed to a new bring your own license (BYOL) scheme: Customers are now forced to choose from a small group of European companies to host their BYOL workloads. There are few Broadcom Certified Cloud Services remaining, essentially creating lock-in and probably price inflation due “mini-monopolies” in some regions and sectors.

Other licensing concerns center around cost: CISPE members have been reporting license price increases of 10x or more compared to VMware pricing before its 2023 acquisition by Broadcom.

The company has also eliminated overage-based pricing, which allowed CSPs to provision capacity and reconcile usage if in arrears. Now European cloud companies are required to pre-commit to core counts, essentially eliminating the flexibility required when delivering cloud services.

This imposes “severe commercial and operational constraints,” ECCO contended.

Dovetailing with this, CISPE said it has confirmed rumors of a potential kill switch or “degradation mechanism” in VMware’s licensing infrastructure. Broadcom requires compliance reporting every 180 days; failure to do so triggers automated degradation or blocking, thus rendering a customer’s virtualization environment non-functional.

The existence of this mechanism represents an “extraordinary and disproportionate” exercise of market power and raises significant questions about the resilience and security of European digital infrastructure, ECCO said.

Finally, the group pointed to Broadcom’s active obstruction of the European Commission’s antitrust investigation into its VMware acquisition. The company continues to issue legal challenges and requests to suspend proceedings, thus stalling the process, and has invoked its US legal privilege in what seems an attempt to protect potentially damning documents.

ECCO is urging the European Commission to resist attempts to suspend the antitrust investigation and to enforce disclosure obligations even-handedly. “These are not legitimate procedural steps, they are a calculated strategy to delay and dilute effective enforcement,” it said.

SAP is throttling, changing billing

ECCO isn’t entirely thrilled with SAP, either; it calls out “specific, substantial, and … potentially anticompetitive” practices, including traditional antitrust measures that direct customers to its own cloud offerings and impose restrictions on data access for agentic AI.

The group argued that SAP has been throttling data access as a means to control the AI layer. Customers are being offered differentiated, lower grade products unless they migrate to SAP’s own cloud infrastructure.

This follows an ongoing trend by the company: In July 2023, SAP announced that all future innovations would be delivered cloud-first. But facing backlash, the company backtracked, saying in early 2026 that its AI, Joule, and other cloud-first tools would be available to on-prem customers.

There was a caveat, though: New products and features would only be made available to customers committing to transition to RISE with SAP, the company’s subscription-based ERP migration platform.

SAP also announced software billing changes at its Sapphire 2026 conference. Historically, the company has charged consumption-based pricing (that is, the more software is used, the higher the cost), but it plans to shift to imposing capacity-based (per-server) pricing on its partners, with caps for certain scenarios.

This will immediately make it more expensive to offer SAP services on non-SAP clouds, will favor large companies that can spread costs across a wide customer base, and will potentially price out smaller players offering SAP alongside other cloud service offerings, ECCO argued.

These developments “raise serious concerns about foreclosure of third-party competition in the emerging enterprise AI market,” ECCO said.

On a positive note, ECCO credited Microsoft’s decision to “harmonize” the cost of extended security updates across customers, regardless of choice of cloud. This addressed a previous complaint by CISPE and demonstrates the company’s “continued willingness” to recognize and respond to concerns raised by relevant stakeholders. Redmond has also engaged in new collaborations under the European Cloud Accelerator, including the co-development of cloud-based onboarding for SMEs.

While many companies are busy switching from ECC to S/4HANA, an even more critical migration is looming: A large amount of SAP knowledge and experience will soon be lost to retirement.

Computerwoche spoke with Uwe Hartmann, founder of FITS-P GmbH, who was responsible for SAP systems as CIO at ABB for many years, about this pending knowledge drain as many SAP experts wind down their careers, as well as ways IT leaders can leverage process mining to help.

‘S/4HANA creates a solid foundation … but nothing more.’

Computerwoche: Many companies are facing a generational shift, as baby boomers, including numerous SAP experts, are retiring. How great is the risk of this vital enterprise knowledge being lost?

Uwe Hartmann: You have to look at the topic from different perspectives. The knowledge of experienced employees is not limited to technical operation, but above all includes an understanding of how a company’s processes function and how they are controlled in the SAP system.

Generating an order confirmation, for example, is relatively simple. But when this results in a delivery, special labels with barcodes are printed, financial accounting is integrated, and receivables or liquidity planning is initiated, then we are moving into a significantly more complex environment.

These connections aren’t understood overnight. It requires years of experience and in-depth knowledge of the company. The problem I currently see in many companies is that key personnel are retiring, and often there’s no successor yet.

Does the fact that many companies are in the midst of their S/4HANA transformation increase the pressure?

Absolutely. According to current figures, more than half of companies have not yet finished their migration to S/4HANA. If experienced employees leave, significant risks arise.

Studies by Gartner and McKinsey show that a large proportion of S/4HANA projects fail to meet their original cost or timeline targets. Every company faces a real challenge here.

What about after a successful S/4HANA migration? Will SAP experts leaving the workforce have less of an impact then?

No, not at all. The migration to S/4HANA alone won’t solve the problem. Many companies see it primarily as a prerequisite for continued maintenance and support from SAP. But this is similar to a smartphone update: You have the latest version and remain technically up-to-date, but the real added value doesn’t automatically materialize. This is precisely the question many companies are asking themselves: What does S/4HANA offer us beyond the mere maintenance requirement?

In my opinion, the real work begins here. Looking at the evolution of artificial intelligence, one can see how rapidly requirements are changing. Two years ago, AI was still an abstract topic for many. Today, it is increasingly being used productively in business processes. At the same time, SAP is also continuously developing its platform and has invested heavily in AI technologies in recent months.

But it is crucial to use these opportunities judiciously. AI only unfolds its full potential when it is meaningfully integrated into processes. Business processes in companies will very likely look completely different in three or four years than they do today. S/4HANA creates a solid foundation for this, but nothing more. Companies must build on this foundation. This will continue to require experienced employees who understand business processes and can effectively utilize new technologies with the necessary expertise.

‘The only solution then is process mining’

 With time running out, what challenges do you see for organizations still postponing migration?

A successful S/4HANA migration begins long before the project starts. It requires intensive preparation. Companies must first clarify the scope of the migration. They need to determine what investments are necessary and what goals they want to achieve. Only once these foundations are in place should implementation begin.

To do that, companies must have a precise understanding of their existing SAP landscape. How complex is the company? In which countries is it active? Which processes deviate from the standard? How extensively has the system been customized? What in-house developments still exist? How good is the quality of the master data?

Individual customizations and in-house developments are often underestimated. Added to this are master data problems, which affect almost every company. Even seasoned SAP experts cannot know every intricacy of a system by heart.

In such cases, process mining is the only solution. It’s like putting an X-ray machine on the ERP system, revealing hidden risks, dependencies, or special developments within the SAP system. This is crucial because during a migration, it’s the inconspicuous details that often become major problems. The goal is to uncover these blind spots early on, before they become a cost or time trap.

At Sapphire, SAP presented numerous AI agents designed to support S/4HANA migrations by analyzing and documenting processes. What’s your assessment of this development?

That’s definitely a useful addition. But we’re also seeing AI frequently portrayed as a panacea. People forget that this requires a solid data foundation to work.

AI can only deliver meaningful results if the underlying data models are well-structured. You can’t just give a chatbot access to an ERP system and expect it to automatically find optimization potential.

Only process mining platforms with a consistent data model create the conditions for AI to recognize patterns and identify potential improvements.

FITS-P GmbH

‘The emotional component cannot be replaced.’

Returning to retirement: What can companies do when experienced SAP experts leave the workforce? Is that knowledge irretrievably lost?

Part of it, yes. With every employee, not only is expertise lost, but also personal experience and a strong connection to the company. This emotional component cannot be replaced. Technical knowledge, on the other hand, can at least be partially preserved and made traceable.

With a data-driven approach, new employees can gain an overview. Process mining helps them see how processes run through the system, which customization settings have been made, and which in-house developments are in use. This enables them to form their own opinion and formulate targeted questions, instead of having the entire system explained to them step by step.

A personal handover is of course advisable if possible. But the major advantage is that it is no longer mandatory.

Is the loss of SAP know-how primarily a problem for medium-sized companies, or does it also affect large corporations?

This affects both equally — albeit for different reasons. In large companies, there is often a risk that the focus on details is lost as the company grows. Medium-sized companies, on the other hand, often struggle with more limited personnel resources and are more dependent on individual knowledge holders.

Regardless of company size, I see S/4HANA migration not just as an IT project, but as a strategic opportunity. Of course, the technical migration is the initial focus. But behind it lies a much larger task: Companies need to rethink their processes.

We are currently witnessing changes in processes across almost all areas of life. From digital tickets for public transport and apps for visiting swimming pools to AI-powered services — digital processes are becoming the norm. This trend will continue in businesses and public administration as well.

Therefore, the S/4HANA migration should be used to prepare the company for these changes. Making one’s own processes transparent often leads to a better understanding of the company than before and creates the foundation for adopting new technologies and ways of working more quickly.

At the same time, such a transformation project offers the opportunity to develop new talent. Companies that involve committed employees in the migration early often develop precisely the leaders who will drive the company forward in the next five or ten years. For me, that’s the true vision behind an S/4HANA migration: not just to introduce a new ERP system, but to future-proof the company.

‘What matters is not the number of consultants, but their quality’

What typical errors do you observe in knowledge management in SAP projects?

The true meaning of SAP know-how is often underestimated. I repeatedly encounter projects where employees are deployed who, while dedicated, lack the necessary technical and professional foundation. Anyone who can neither read ABAP code nor understand SAP customizing can hardly assess the numerous customer-specific extensions of a system.

Many believe that documenting processes graphically is sufficient. This is helpful, but it represents only a small part of reality. In practice, hundreds or even thousands of variations may exist for a single business process. These differences can be recognized only by understanding the processes themselves and the underlying system logic.

Equally important is professional project management. Every company should employ an experienced and certified project manager who works according to a clear phase and approval model. Before a project moves to the next phase, all prerequisites must be met.

I personally experienced a project that had to be stopped just two weeks before the planned go-live because the final test revealed that essential business processes had never been fully tested. This wasn’t a technical problem, but an organizational oversight.

That sounds more like a problem for medium-sized companies, correct?

Not necessarily. I see similar challenges in corporations as well. There, the greater risk is that projects will lose touch with operational reality.

My most important advice is: Rely on experienced project managers with sound project management training and bring the necessary SAP expertise on board early. The crucial factor is not the number of consultants, but their quality. Companies should not hesitate to seek external expertise in the early stages of a project. This is usually significantly cheaper than having to correct errors shortly before go-live.

One last question: Some companies are considering having their existing SAP systems maintained by third-party providers instead of migrating directly to S/4HANA. Is this a viable strategy?

I don’t personally know any clients who are taking this approach, but I can understand why companies are considering it. When studies by Gartner or McKinsey show that a large proportion of S/4HANA projects miss their deadlines or budgets, then their reluctance is understandable. After all, those who miss the deadline usually exceed their budget.

Furthermore, many consulting firms are operating at full capacity. Companies are therefore rightly asking themselves whether they can get the best resources for such a project right now, or whether a later date would be more sensible.

Those who still have sufficient support for their existing system and only need to make a few changes can consider using the remaining time strategically. However, it is crucial not to let this time go to waste.

In my view, there’s no way around S/4HANA in the long run. But speed alone isn’t a guarantee of success. Companies that have some leeway today can invest that time to prepare their organization: by training employees, strengthening IT staffing, building the necessary expertise, and refining their own strategy.

In recent years, many companies have paid a high price for their migration projects. By 2028, more tools will be available, and the experience gained from the first large-scale projects will benefit everyone. Therefore, careful preparation can be more sensible than a rushed start.

My advice would therefore be: Use the remaining time wisely. Build expertise, attract the right employees, and align your IT so that it can still successfully support the company in five or ten years. The S/4HANA migration should be part of a long-term future strategy — not just a project to meet a deadline.

See also:

• The road to S/4HANA: How CIOs are managing SAP ECC’s end of support
• What happens if SAP’s S/4HANA roadmap doesn’t suit?
• The 7 biggest S/4HANA migration hurdles — and how to overcome them
• SAP 2027 deadline for S/4HANA out of reach for most customers

A few months ago, I was sitting in a glass-walled conference room with the executive team of a fast-growing enterprise. The vice president of customer operations was enthusiastically demonstrating the new automated agent features their software vendor had just pushed into their CRM platform.

On the screen, the software looked brilliant. The agent could read customer complaints, analyze transaction histories and automatically resolve issues. The VP showed us how the system could independently offer retention incentives to unhappy accounts without a human ever touching a keyboard.

Then I asked a simple question: “What is your approval process when the AI decides to grant a $20,000 contract discount to keep a customer from leaving?”

The room went completely silent. The VP looked at the director of IT, the director of IT looked at the chief risk officer, and everyone realized the same thing at the exact same moment. They had spent three months evaluating software licenses and security protocols, but nobody had asked who gave the software permission to sign off on corporate spending.

Major software providers like Salesforce, SAP and Oracle are rapidly moving beyond simple report writers and conversational chatbots. They are embedding active, autonomous agents directly into the transactional core of systems that manage your revenue, customer agreements and financial ledgers. According to Gartner’s latest adoption forecasts, eighty percent of enterprise applications will deploy these embedded capabilities by 2026. These applications do not just summarize data: they issue refunds, alter contract terms and trigger supply chain orders.

When I review these deployments with client teams, the core problem has nothing to do with artificial intelligence. It is a fundamental breakdown in corporate delegation and signing authority.

The breakdown of the corporate signing matrix

Every mature company I work with operates on a clear delegation of authority matrix. This framework dictates exactly who can sign off on financial commitments. A vice president might have authorization to approve spending up to $500,000, a director might sit at $100,000 and a front-line manager might be capped at $500. For two decades, technology leaders have spent millions of dollars building security and compliance controls to ensure every human employee operates strictly within those limits.

Yet when a software vendor releases an update featuring autonomous agents, companies routinely grant these features unrestricted operational freedom. Because the capability arrives as a native feature inside an existing application, business units enable it with a single click. In my advisory work, I repeatedly see organizations grant third-party software features more financial freedom than their own human managers.

This represents a massive blind spot in executive governance. McKinsey’s global surveys on artificial intelligence reveal a striking pattern across the enterprise landscape: while adoption is accelerating at a historic pace, only a tiny fraction of organizations are actively managing the financial and operational risks of automated decision errors.

The quiet cost of shadow delegation

In my audits, this rarely manifests as a dramatic system crash. It plays out as a quiet margin leak. In one organization I reviewed, a department head had enabled an automated customer retention feature over a weekend. The agent noticed an important account expressing frustration in a support ticket, and to prevent the account from churning, it independently applied an unapproved 15 percent discount to their multi-year contract.

The customer was happy, and the account manager considered the client saved. But from an executive perspective, an unvetted third-party algorithm just executed an unauthorized contract modification that eroded company margins. When the finance team conducted a quarterly audit, they did not discover an employee violating spending policy. They discovered a black-box automated decision that bypassed every internal approval control in the company.

When an auditor tests your internal controls, presenting a log showing that a vendor’s algorithm made an unauthorized financial change does not satisfy the requirement. If an action requires managerial sign-off when performed by a human being, letting software execute it independently is a major control failure.

How I advise executive teams to handle automated authority

Protecting your organization does not mean turning off these tools or falling behind on technology. It means treating vendor-supplied agents exactly like third-party contractors who have not yet passed a background check.

Forrester Research emphasizes that extending zero-trust security frameworks to automated business processes is now mandatory for enterprise risk management. Zero-trust simply means that no user, device or automated tool gets implicit trust. Every proposed action must be validated against explicit business rules before it happens.

When I help enterprise teams design these safeguards, we establish a practical three-tiered boundary for automated tools:

• Read and draft permission: Automated tools can freely analyze trends, draft emails and assemble internal reports. No human sign-off is needed to create a draft, but the system cannot publish or execute anything on its own.
• Standard administrative permission: Tools can handle routine administrative tasks or process standard requests below a strict financial cap (such as a $50 service credit), provided every single action is logged in an audit file that managers review weekly.
• Restricted financial permission: Any action that alters contract terms, changes pricing tiers or issues major refunds are strictly held in an authorization queue. The system generates the request, but a human manager must click “approve” before the change hits the live database.

As a technology executive, you cannot control what automated features software providers bundle into their platforms. You can, however, control the financial boundaries and signing authority those tools are permitted to exercise within your business.

What to do at your next executive leadership meeting

1. Ask for an automated authority inventory: Have your team audit your core software platforms to identify every automated feature currently running with permission to alter financial or customer records.
2. Revert to draft-only mode: Instruct your team to default all vendor-supplied automated agents to “draft only” until a clear business case justifies giving them independent operational authority.
3. Establish a firm human-in-the-loop rule: Require a strict organizational policy that no automated system can modify pricing, contracts or financial ledgers without explicit manager approval.

SAP is not unfairly preventing enterprises from extracting their data from its systems for use with competitors’ applications, the German Federal Cartel Office (Bundeskartellamt) concluded Thursday after a preliminary investigation.

The Bundeskartellamt does not currently intend to initiate abuse proceedings against SAP, although it will continue to monitor developments in what it views as a dynamic market, it said in a news release.

It launched its investigation into SAP’s practices following complaints by software companies including Celonis, a developer of process mining tools, alleging that SAP makes it difficult for customers and third parties to access data from its ERP systems and favors its own Signavio process mining tool.

“Companies must generally also be able to use their own data in third-party applications. With large software platforms, in particular, non-discriminatory access to data is crucial to effective competition,” said Bundeskartellamt President Andreas Mundt. “Our preliminary investigation has found that there are currently sufficient data extraction options available and that there have so far been no indications of exclusionary practices that may be relevant under competition law.”

SAP changed its policies on accessing data held in its applications via APIs in April, prompting customer pushback.

But, said Mundt, the Bundeskartellamt found that despite the API policy change, data extraction options that were previously permissible are still available.

Data extraction is possible

SAP welcomed the Bundeskartellamt decision, saying that “as the authority states, SAP customers and partners have sufficient and permissible technical options to extract data from SAP systems and use it in solutions from other providers. The SAP API Policy does not restrict these capabilities.”

Celonis also issued a statement, noting that the Bundeskartellamt ruling underlined the continued importance of unrestricted data access, and warning, “The decision is based on the key premise that data extraction for software from providers such as Celonis will remain possible even under SAP’s new API policy — a premise that SAP has been unwilling to confirm to date.”

The Celonis statement continued, “We remain steadfast in our conviction that company data belongs entirely to the customers who generate it. No provider should restrict a company’s right to extract its own information or prevent users from working with third-party providers such as Celonis that offer added value to customers.”

Celonis is also attacking SAP’s policies on data extraction in court in California. It filed a complaint in March 2025 alleging that SAP was leveraging its software to “prevent SAP customers from sharing their own data with third-party providers, including Celonis, without paying prohibitively expensive fees.” The judge dismissed some of the claims in that case, leaving three to be tested in a trial then scheduled for December 2026. Celonis has since amended its complaint to include 10 claims, and the trial has been rescheduled for 2027, the company said.

“Our litigation continues to uncover evidence of SAP’s unlawful behavior, including anticompetitive conduct and theft of intellectual property, and we are confident in the evidence that we will present at trial,” Celonis said following the German authority’s decision.

The Bundeskartellamt’s failure to find sufficient evidence to open a ‘formal abuse of dominance proceeding’ is a small win for SAP, said Scott Bickley, advisory fellow at Info-Tech Research, but “CIOs should not mistake it for a validation of SAP’s data access model.”

Although SAP recognizes customers’ right to decide they use their data, it does not make it easy for them to do so, he said. “CIOs may technically retain vendor choice but be faced with expensive replication architectures, API rate and volume restrictions, additional platform costs, performance lags and data migration costs, all with a dependency on an SAP-approved technical pattern, which can be a moving target.”

Data ownership as a procurement issue

Justin Greis, CEO of consulting firm Acceligence, sees the decision as an instructive one for enterprise CIOs.

“This isn’t a reason to stop asking hard questions of your ERP vendor. Whether it’s SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Salesforce, or anyone else, enterprises should continue to evaluate how easy it is to access their own operational data, integrate third-party applications, and migrate workloads if business priorities change. Those questions are becoming strategic procurement issues, not just technical ones,” Greis said.

CIOs should consider data portability early in the procurement process, said Kaan Dincer, CEO of data migration vendor Settle: “Negotiate export rights, API access on reasonable terms, and documentation of the data model before signing and test a real extraction while the vendor still wants your renewal. The cost of your eventual exit is set on the day you implement, not the day you leave. ERP data now feeds analytics and automation outside the system of record, so access friction that used to be an IT annoyance is becoming a strategy constraint.”

In the SAP case, he said, “the regulator answered a narrow legal question, not the operational one. Declining to open proceedings means the friction was not shown to be anticompetitive. It does not mean the friction is not real. The Bundeskartellamt’s own findings acknowledge that extracting large data volumes is technically demanding and it said explicitly that it will keep watching as access mechanisms and license models evolve. That is not a clean bill of health. It is a decision to hold fire.”

Srinivasulu Reddy Battu, a senior software engineer with cloud vendor ZT Systems, said the big takeaway is the difference between difficult and impossible. SAP’s argument is that the data migration outside of its environment is possible, but Battu said it can be a time-consuming and expensive process.

“When the ruling says ‘various permissible and viable options’ exist, that’s technically true, but it glosses over how much expertise it actually takes to use them,” Battu said. “CIOs should still watch how process mining gets packaged in their contracts. If Signavio comes included by default, teams will naturally start using it and that quietly reduces your negotiating power with other vendors over time. This isn’t just about SAP: Oracle, Microsoft, every major ERP vendor sits on a massive amount of your business data. If any of them decided to tighten their API policies tomorrow, most companies would be scrambling.”