SAP’s push to remake itself as an “Autonomous Enterprise” reached a new milestone this month with the unveiling of more than 200 autonomous AI agents at the Sapphire conference in Orlando. But the fanfare masked a harder reality: access to the most powerful tools comes with a string attached. Customers must shift at least half of their maintenance spending to the cloud, escalating the pressure on the roughly 20,000 businesses still running legacy ECC systems.
Chief Technology Officer Philipp Herzig framed the agent rollout as a job catalyst, even as the company expands its team in India and forces existing staff to retool. The technical backbone is the SAP Knowledge Graph, a data layer designed to let agents work across business functions. In SuccessFactors, the HR module, dozens of specialized agents and 14 new assistants will take over recruiting tasks starting in June 2026. Currently, 80% of recruiting time is eaten up by administrative work — exactly the kind of process SAP wants to automate.
Early results from cash management tests show the manual workload falling by as much as 80%. For packaging compliance, time required dropped by half, and simulation cycles that once took a full day now wrap up in 20 minutes. Those gains reinforce SAP’s argument that artificial intelligence can deliver measurable productivity improvements, not just hype.
Still, scepticism lingers. Gartner estimates that only 41% of agentic AI projects turn a positive return within a year, and many may be scrapped by the end of 2027 if results don’t improve. Bain puts the median payback period at just over nine months, a timeline that leaves little room for error. Among major investment houses, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Jefferies and Berenberg reiterated buy ratings in May; JP Morgan stayed neutral, while DZ Bank recommended selling.
Should investors sell immediately? Or is it worth buying SAP?
The stock has yet to reflect the optimism. After closing last Friday at €152.10, SAP shares have managed only a 1.55% gain over seven days and a 2.26% increase over the past month. That still leaves the stock down 24.70% year to date, and the recovery feels more like stabilization than a U-turn. The relative strength index suggests the recent bounce is already stretched, and the dividend — set at €2.50 per share for 2025, a 6.38% increase — offers only modest support.
Data infrastructure is the quiet heavyweight in SAP’s strategy. The acquisition of Reltio closed on 7 May 2026, giving the company a tool to unify and clean data from both SAP and non-SAP systems. Next comes Prior Labs, a specialist in tabular foundation models. SAP has signed a binding agreement that will see more than one billion euros flow over the next four years. The deal is expected to close in the second half of 2026, and Prior Labs will continue operating as a standalone unit. The logic is straightforward: Reltio scrubs the data, Dremio connects it, and Prior Labs supplies the models.
CEO Christian Klein has acknowledged the gap between experimentation and tangible business outcomes. Almost every company tests AI, he noted, but measurable benefits remain limited. That is precisely why SAP needs cleaner data, deeper cloud penetration and larger customer projects.
The next true test arrives on July 23, when SAP reports second-quarter results. In the first quarter, the cloud backlog grew 25% on a currency-adjusted basis to €21.9 billion. Investors will be watching to see whether the AI story translates into bigger cloud contracts — turning product vision into revenue pressure.
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