Xmateria sponsored SAP Sapphire in Orlando and Madrid this year, and the team came back with plenty to say. Marketing lead Catherine Hammond-Berns put Head of Solutions Alex Smith in the hotseat to get his take on what he saw, heard and felt across both events, and what it all signals for SAP customers.

Catherine: Alex, you’ve been in the SAP ecosystem for over twenty years - starting at Accenture, rolling out ECC 6.0, and now leading Solutions at Xmateria. Coming away from both Sapphire events this year, what's the headline?

Alex: The headline is the Autonomous Enterprise - AI agents, and crucially, value beyond chatbots and large language models. We're talking about agentic squads performing real roles: code remediation, data quality, data management, automated testing - all leveraging SAP's AI operating system. You do get AI fatigue. Hearing "value-driven", "autonomy" and "AI" from everyone makes you slightly cynical. But scratch the surface and I do think this is a pivotal moment. The investment SAP is making, backed up by the figures Christian Klein presented, makes it clear they mean business.

Catherine: Did Orlando and Madrid feel like the same event, or did the mood shift between them?

Alex: Two very different experiences. America got the message first, so the buzz in Orlando was very real - excitement, energy, the headlines being made live. By the time we got to Madrid, people had read the keynote write-ups and had time to ask harder questions. Europe has a more cautious view on big marketing messages i.e. what does this really mean, how will it be implemented, what about licensing, when will it actually be available, did the demos reflect a utopian vision that isn't quite there yet? Some of that comes from the European position on AI regulation. But also organisations have spent a lot of money on their current systems. The question Madrid kept asking was: what is this going to do to it? So, it was both cultural and a function of the time gap between the two events.

Catherine: One thing that struck you was the presence of Palantir and Conduct at the events. What did you make of that?

Alex: It struck me as a bit confused, frankly. SAP's whole pitch is that their intellectual property, their knowledge, their data model is where the advantage lies in delivering enterprise AI. And yet they're embracing partnerships with their competitors. It was a bit like the Wild West - exciting, but the pond has been disturbed and as an obvious result, the water is very unclear. We need to wait for things to settle. Ultimately SAP wants to be the winner here. Their install base using their AI capabilities has to be the goal. But there's a real risk in letting partners come in and start to learn the semantics of the data model, because that knowledge could eventually threaten the application layer and the user interaction itself.

Catherine: You had a stand at both events and spoke to a lot of customers. What were they actually asking you about?

Alex: Honestly, most conversations weren't about the Autonomous Enterprise vision at all. They were about the gap. Customers are still focused on their position today and a lot of them are still on ECC, or in a landscape that doesn't have S/4HANA at its core. With the 2027 and 2030 maintenance deadlines looming, they know they need to consider their move - RISE, Cloud ALM, full SAP suite including BDC, or some hybrid path. People know they need to be moving to an S/4HANA data model to take advantage of the universal ledger, the simplified data model, the new processes, Fiori - the platform that the AI is being built on. The autonomous enterprise needs that foundation, and most customers aren't there yet. The gap between where SAP is going and where customers actually are is the real story.

Catherine: And data kept coming up in those conversations?

Alex: Constantly. The AI question has heightened customers' awareness of the quality and completeness of their data in a way I haven't seen before. People are finally realising their information is an asset with the potential benefit of its use. For twenty years there's been a cheat code: do a greenfield, populate it with clean data and the benefits develop over time. That's gone. The benefits of AI don't live in the new process, they live in AI being able to access a history of data and data that makes sense. If your data isn't right, the benefits case doesn't stack up.

The CTO of SAP (Philipp Herzig) said it himself: no AI agent can compensate for a broken data model. I want this pinned to the wall! We had a large energy company come to us at Sapphire, twenty years of custom development, billable days, AMS contracts and forces outside of customer value had driven their system to be so customised that the data model that should be standard now has to be fully assessed and brought back to standard before AI can do anything useful with it. That's not a unique story. That's most of the install base.

Catherine: So how does Xmateria actually help customers bridge that gap?

Alex: Our Pioneer software, available in the SAP Store, sits securely within the customer's SAP landscape and gives them an immediate current-state view of their information and data. From there we rapidly tailor a route to S/4HANA. My recommendation right now, in many instances, is to move rapidly. I.e. A mandatory move, a selective data transformation, taking history where it's necessary and of benefit (production and manufacturing data), open items where you can (finance) and landing with a clean but useful dataset that can be leveraged for day-one and year-one AI benefits.

It isn't a million miles from the messaging in 2020: get to S/4HANA, make sure the core design is right with a clean core, then layer in the innovations. What's changed is that AI has made the cost of not doing it more pressing. This has become a data and information conversation, not a process conversation.

Catherine: Let's talk about the elephant in the room... licensing and commercials. Did Sapphire give clarity?

Alex: It's confused, in my opinion. People are asking, 'why am I suddenly being told I can use AI capability on my ECC environment? What commitments do I have to make to SAP to unlock that? What does it mean for RISE adoption versus my own hyperscaler choice? And if I can use AI on my current system and the maintenance deadlines look like they may slip again, what's my real driver to move to S/4HANA?' The vision and the capability are exciting. But there's still murkiness around licences and the commercial demands sitting between SAP account executives and customers. That's where the majority of conversations will be focused over the next twelve months.

Catherine: Final question. What do you want readers to walk away thinking?

Alex: Be excited. This is a pivotal moment and the potential is real. But please don't make the same mistake we've been making for 20 years, that a new shiny object is going to solve everything. There is no silver bullet. Starting again with a new implementation won't work. Buying AI won't work on its own. The cliché is true: poor quality data means poor AI outcomes. Really understand what that means for you. What data do you have? Where does it live? How old is it? What do you need from a business and risk perspective - retention (incl. legal), archiving?

Rapidly understand your data, break it down by context, look left to right at what you have and what foundation it gives you. Then plan a no-regrets move to the next platform: a selective data migration, a conversion to S/4, a clean-core code remediation, a foundational data-led system you can layer agentic AI on top of. This isn't impossible. With the right approach, a selective migration can take nine to twelve months instead of two or three years.

The worst thing you can do is ruminate about your future AI enterprise and ignore what you already have. Don't design the future without understanding the present. Start with what you have, leverage what you've already invested in, define the foundation and move quickly.

If anything in these reflections raises questions about your own SAP data estate, we're happy to talk it through. Find out more about Pioneer or get in touch.