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Here's the full picture drawn from the latest analyst and industry data.
The core tension is unusually sharp right now. SAP clients face a contractual deadline (ECC support ends 2027, with paid extensions to 2030) that creates urgency — but the AI landscape is evolving fast enough that boards are genuinely questioning whether the destination justifies the journey.
A few things stand out from the research:
Cost remains the primary barrier, with 62% of organisations citing high project costs as a key challenge — a concern that is particularly strong when considering RISE specifically. This isn't just licence fees. An IDC white paper found the average cost of migration to S/4HANA on IaaS runs approximately $1.5 million in third-party consulting alone, with a similar $1.5 million cost of business disruption — and for organisations moving from ECC, roughly $4.9 million more if a database migration is also required.
The vendor lock-in concern has moved from theoretical to documented. The Nayara Energy case — where SAP India suspended ERP services to India's second-largest refinery over EU sanctions in 2025 — put the risk in stark terms. Nayara's court petition explicitly stated that SAP software "is fully integrated and customised to every operation" over 18 years, and that switching to any alternative is simply not possible.
The newest and most acute concern is the April 2026 API policy. Section 2.2.2 of SAP's API Policy v4/2026 prohibits the use of SAP APIs for "interaction or integration with (semi-)autonomous or generative AI systems that plan, select, or execute sequences of API calls" — in plain language, no third-party AI agents on SAP data unless SAP approves them. The practical effect is that customer data inside SAP becomes accessible only to AI tools SAP has blessed — including its own Joule and Anthropic-powered SAP integrations — while Microsoft Copilot, Salesforce Einstein, and a long tail of agentic vendors who all build SAP connectors face compliance problems.
On the AI disruption question, CIOs are increasingly rejecting vendor "landlord" dynamics in favour of strategies that preserve flexibility, with the argument that third-party support for SAP can extend ERP life for 15 years and beyond — freeing capital and time to innovate without disruption while the AI landscape clarifies.
The bottom line: for large enterprises, this is less a technology decision than a 5-year strategic bet on whether SAP's cloud ERP model survives the transition to agentic AI intact — and whether the organisation can afford to be wrong.
