In brief: SAP CEO Christian Klein sees significant competitive pressure from AI agents offered by US and Chinese providers and describes the AI transformation as bigger than the preceding shift to the cloud.
SAP CEO Christian Klein sees his company under considerable time pressure in the race for AI-powered business process software. Speaking to the «Süddeutsche Zeitung», he explained that neither US nor Chinese providers would wait for SAP.
Christian Klein commented on SAP’s current position in the context of AI development in an interview with the «Süddeutsche Zeitung». He posed the core question directly: if SAP’s own AI tool does not understand business processes better than an AI agent developed by a competitor, for instance together with the US company Anthropic, then SAP has a problem. Klein said verbatim: “We have to act quickly, nobody in the US or China is waiting for us. They all want to beat us.”
The statement comes against the backdrop of the decline in SAP’s share price over the past eighteen months. Klein put this into perspective by pointing out that an entire software industry is currently at stake. The decisive question, he said, is whether established providers like SAP can hold their ground or whether AI agents from new market entrants will eventually replace classic enterprise software.
For executives and decision-makers at companies running SAP systems, this assessment by the CEO is a signal regarding the provider’s strategic direction. Klein described the upcoming AI transformation as bigger than the preceding cloud transformation, during which SAP customers were moved from on-premises software to subscription-based cloud solutions, partly to enable faster updates for new AI applications.
SAP is an established provider of enterprise management software for areas such as finance, HR, manufacturing, sales and procurement. Klein expressed confidence that SAP can deliver an AI that genuinely understands business processes, but himself described the impending change as profound for the company.
Source: www.it-daily.net · Published August 5, 2026
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