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Which SAP clients will be the last to hit the AI tsunami?
Which SAP clients will be the last to hit the AI tsunami?
For implementation partners, it's a fair question right now.
My observation: it depends a lot on who runs the company.
Core industrial clients (oil and gas, farming and similar) are often led by top management from that core industry. They generally show slower adoption of the latest IT. Not a weakness: their priority is stability and operations.
Technology companies (electronics, software developers, companies like Google) adopt AI much faster. Their core skills are already aligned, and they understand the benefits from day one.
The data broadly agrees. Eurostat 2025: 62.5% of EU enterprises in information & communication use AI, vs 10.8% in construction.
But two cautions before calling any client "safe":
1. Slow in the back office is not slow everywhere.
Aramco reports $1.8B of AI-driven value in 2024, with AI predicting maintenance and optimising production. Many industrial clients run AI in operations long before it reaches ERP.
2. The tsunami may hit the partner first, not the client.
AI is entering SAP delivery itself: code remediation, testing, migration. And ECC mainstream maintenance still ends in 2027, AI or not.
How to read a client's pattern:
- When did they adopt the internet / website?
- When did they come to SAP? Move to ECC? To S/4HANA?
- Does anyone at the top come from tech?
- How clean is their master data? AI on messy data goes nowhere.
A client late on every one is likely late on AI too. A client early on all of them is probably already experimenting.
Obviously exceptions, but the trend is there.
So maybe the real question is not which clients are safe, but how long our old delivery model stays safe with any of them.
Which kind of clients are you working with right now?
#SAP #SAPMDG #S4HANA #AI #DigitalTransformation
For implementation partners, it's a fair question right now.
My observation: it depends a lot on who runs the company.
Core industrial clients (oil and gas, farming and similar) are often led by top management from that core industry. They generally show slower adoption of the latest IT. Not a weakness: their priority is stability and operations.
Technology companies (electronics, software developers, companies like Google) adopt AI much faster. Their core skills are already aligned, and they understand the benefits from day one.
The data broadly agrees. Eurostat 2025: 62.5% of EU enterprises in information & communication use AI, vs 10.8% in construction.
But two cautions before calling any client "safe":
1. Slow in the back office is not slow everywhere.
Aramco reports $1.8B of AI-driven value in 2024, with AI predicting maintenance and optimising production. Many industrial clients run AI in operations long before it reaches ERP.
2. The tsunami may hit the partner first, not the client.
AI is entering SAP delivery itself: code remediation, testing, migration. And ECC mainstream maintenance still ends in 2027, AI or not.
How to read a client's pattern:
- When did they adopt the internet / website?
- When did they come to SAP? Move to ECC? To S/4HANA?
- Does anyone at the top come from tech?
- How clean is their master data? AI on messy data goes nowhere.
A client late on every one is likely late on AI too. A client early on all of them is probably already experimenting.
Obviously exceptions, but the trend is there.
So maybe the real question is not which clients are safe, but how long our old delivery model stays safe with any of them.
Which kind of clients are you working with right now?
#SAP #SAPMDG #S4HANA #AI #DigitalTransformation