Shares in SAP have clawed back only modestly from a 52-week low of €137.62, trading at €142.00 on Friday – a gain of just 0.52% on the day. That leaves the stock nearly 30% lower since the start of the year and a full 48% below its June 2025 peak of €271.60. The tepid recovery underscores a growing rift between the company’s ambitious artificial intelligence strategy and the market’s willingness to pay for it.
The centrepiece of that strategy, unveiled at SAP’s Sapphire conference in Orlando, is the “Autonomous Enterprise”. The concept bundles the Business Technology Platform, Business Data Cloud and Business AI into a single environment, the SAP Business AI Platform, where more than 50 Joule assistants will orchestrate over 200 specialised agents. These agents are designed to automate processes across finance, supply chain, human resources and customer management. SAP has assembled a broad coalition of technology partners to support the vision, including Anthropic, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft, NVIDIA and Palantir.
Yet the market’s reaction has been decidedly cool. Analysts point to a fundamental tension: to access the new AI tools – including the Joule assistant – legacy customers must either sign a RISE with SAP contract or shift at least half of their maintenance spending to the cloud. Roughly two-thirds of SAP’s installed base still run older ECC or on-premises versions, and their migration has been hesitant. The requirement is seen by some as an additional pressure point rather than an incentive, stoking fears that customer frustration could slow adoption.
Compounding the anxiety, SAP disclosed security vulnerabilities in both its Commerce Cloud and S/4HANA systems during the event. While the company has not detailed the extent of the exposure, the revelations added to the downward pressure on the stock and further dented sentiment around the company’s ability to execute a seamless transition.
Should investors sell immediately? Or is it worth buying SAP?
To reinforce its data architecture for enterprise-scale AI, SAP has been on an acquisition spree. In March it announced the planned purchase of Reltio, a master-data-management specialist. More recently it said it would acquire Dremio, a data lakehouse provider, with the deal expected to close in the third quarter of 2026. And in a separate move, SAP committed $1.17 billion over four years to Prior Labs, a company specialising in tabular foundation models for structured data. Prior Labs will remain independent. The aim is to build an Apache Iceberg-native enterprise lakehouse that can fuse SAP and non-SAP data – a prerequisite for agentic AI to function reliably on clean, accessible corporate datasets.
Analysts remain cautious. DZ Bank’s Armin Kremser described the Sapphire announcements as strategically positive, reinforcing SAP’s claim to be the central AI and data platform in the ERP core. But he cautioned that AI is currently more an adoption theme than a clear revenue driver. Berenberg’s Nay Soe Naing said he was not surprised that SAP left its medium-term targets unchanged, and he keeps a price target of €215. The debate is now whether the technology push will translate into a material acceleration in cloud bookings.
Technically, the stock has some ground to recover. The 50-day moving average sits near €152, while the next resistance zone lies between €170 and €180. The relative strength index of 87.5 signals an overbought bounce that has yet to materialise. For now, the fundamentals remain solid: the current cloud order backlog stood at €21.9 billion at the end of the first quarter, and cloud revenue grew 27% year on year. Management is targeting full-year cloud revenue of €25.8 billion to €26.2 billion for 2026.
All eyes now turn to 23 July 2026, when SAP reports second-quarter results. The focus will be on whether the Sapphire momentum has translated into larger contracts and whether customers are moving beyond testing the new AI tools to embedding them in meaningful commitments. Until then, the stock is likely to remain caught between a bold strategic narrative and the messy realities of a customer base that isn’t rushing to the cloud.
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