2025 will be remembered as the year SAP customers finally ran out of road.
For more than a decade, organisations debated the timing, the budget and the need for S/4HANA. AI was discussed in boardrooms, but it still felt experimental when it came to day-to-day operations.
In 2025, both conversations changed. And they changed fast.
Across industries, companies reached the same conclusion: you cannot build a modern, intelligent organisation on legacy systems.
And you cannot unlock the value of S/4HANA without embracing AI. 2025 was the year SAP modernisation and AI adoption became inseparable.
Why attitudes toward S/4HANA finally moved from "We'll get to it." to "We can't afford not to."
SAP customers have known the ECC end-of-support timeline for years. But 2025 was the year businesses truly felt the pressure.
A few reasons pushed companies over the edge:
The global shift in adoption momentum. SAP reported that the majority of net-new SAP customers are now going straight to S/4HANA, and existing customers have accelerated plans significantly.
At the same time, the pool of companies still on ECC remains large, meaning a mounting wave of late adopters now entering a crowded market.
The talent and delivery bottleneck. With thousands of migrations happening at once, organisations found themselves competing for the same architects, programme managers, functional experts and integration specialists.
This led to rising delivery costs and longer timelines for anyone late to the transition.
The true cost of staying on ECC became impossible to ignore.Not just higher maintenance costs but reduced innovation capability, increased cyber exposure and the inability to adopt modern cloud or AI technologies.
Leadership teams demanded a proper business case, not a technical justification.2025 was the year boards stopped signing S/4HANA programmes unless the value case was crystal clear.
The message was straightforward: companies weren’t just moving to S/4HANA to meet a deadline, they were doing it to stay competitive.
Moving from hype to practical application.
2025 was the year AI stopped being a concept and started becoming part of everyday SAP work. A noticeable shift happened:
AI found its place in SAP delivery, not as a replacement for expertise but as a multiplier of it. Teams applied AI to accelerate:
Documentation and blueprinting
Testing cycles
Functional analysis
Data cleansing
Issue resolution
User adoption materials
It made good consultants faster and great consultants exceptional.
S/4HANA programmes using AI moved quicker and struggled less with bottlenecks.AI helped reduce manual workload on tasks that traditionally eat up consulting hours.
This made timelines tighter, deliverables more consistent, and projects less dependent on individual bandwidth.
AI exposed gaps in data readiness. Many organisations learned the hard way that AI is only as good as the data feeding it.
This pushed data quality, governance, and integration to the top of the transformation agenda.
The workforce divide widened. Those embracing AI tools became significantly more productive.
Those avoiding them found themselves slower and less competitive in both internal teams and the contractor market.
2025 made something very clear: SAP modernisation and AI adoption are no longer separate strategies. They’re two sides of the same coin.
Cybersecurity and risk.
While the focus of 2025 was SAP and AI, the underlying driver behind many urgent migrations was risk.
Legacy systems became harder to defend. Outdated authentication, unsupported integrations and complex custom landscapes made ECC environments increasingly vulnerable.
S/4HANA offered a security uplift organisations could no longer ignore. Better identity management, more consistent patching, and a modern architecture aligned with cloud-first strategies.
AI also played a role, enhancing monitoring, threat detection and anomaly identification across SAP landscapes.
The business case.
By mid-2025, one theme emerged across nearly every industry: Leadership teams were no longer willing to fund SAP transformations that couldn’t clearly demonstrate business value.
Companies demanded answers to questions such as:
How will S/4HANA make operations faster?
How does AI fit into the roadmap?
Where will costs be recovered?
What KPIs will show progress?
How quickly will we see benefits?
This pushed organisations to produce business cases focused on:
Efficiency gains
AI enablement
Better decision-making
Long-term cost optimisation
Reduced risk exposure
Scalability and future-proofing
The business case became the backbone of every successful SAP strategy in 2025.
Reshaping expectations.
Perhaps the most defining shift of the year was cultural, not technological.
Teams that embraced AI set a new standard for output. They documented faster, analysed faster, solved problems faster and delivered higher-quality work.
Organisations realised that AI isn’t optional in a modern SAP landscape. It’s becoming a foundational capability of S/4HANA-era operations, much like automation or cloud adoption.
The idea of the “AI-enabled SAP professional” emerged. Companies now expect consultants, architects, analysts and programme leaders to understand:
How to use AI
How AI impacts business processes
How AI integrates with SAP data and workflows
What will 2026 bring?
If 2025 was the year of acceleration, 2026 will likely be the year of optimisation and innovation.
The question now is:
What do you expect to see in 2026?
Will AI become embedded in every SAP role?
Will the S/4HANA wave hit its peak?
Will SAP talent shortages intensify?
Will business cases shift from cost savings to innovation?
Will AI and SAP finally merge into one strategic agenda?
I’d love to hear perspectives from SAP leaders, consultants and transformation teams as we step into another year of disruption and opportunity.
If you’d like deeper market insight, consultancy on shaping your programme and resourcing strategy or support with key hires globally to deliver your transformation, I’d be happy to share what I’m seeing and help shape the right approach. The opportunity is huge but only if you get the people and the strategy right.
Email me: connor.wall@conexusdx.com
Call me: +44 (0) 7854 244 744 / +34 937 374 287