SAP customers see S/4HANA and AI as top digital transformation drivers

Members who’ve been slow to make the shift say they’re struggling with outdated and highly customized legacy systems.

“For many who’ve been on SAP for a long time, it can feel a little daunting to potentially unwind years of customizations,” Scott said. “How do you make sure your business processes are really tuned to a future environment? For those individuals, I’d say the need to change is probably greatest for them, and they’re probably the ones finding it hardest to do.”

Meanwhile, SAP customers from the DSAG community in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland have been critical of SAP’s S/4HANA cloud strategy, with just 13% expressing a positive opinion and nearly half expressing a negative one, according to Jens Hungershausen, DSAG chairman.

The case for AI

The annual survey found that members are increasingly looking at AI and machine learning as among the top technologies impacting digital transformation efforts, surging from 23% of respondents in 2023 to 38% of respondents in 2024. Members say they want to solve numerous challenges with AI, including 42% who want to use it for dashboards and analytics, 22% for customer experience, 21% for transitioning from manual to digital processes, and 21% looking to leverage it for integration between SAP and non-SAP systems.

While there’s been a great deal of excitement around gen AI, further results of the Pulse survey show that concerns over data continue to be an inhibitor to adoption, as only 13% of respondents indicated they were currently willing to load data into a gen AI model.

“Companies are reluctant to add their content as they’re concerned about their IP leaking out through the models,” says Robert Parker, SVP of industry, software, and services research at IDC. “The concern is a bit overblown now as the major vendors have private implementations that keep company content confined to company use. It is pretty safe.”