SAP customers say migration is eating their budgets—and AI is next in line

SAP has unveiled its most ambitious AI vision yet at Sapphire 2026 this week: more than 50 Joule Assistants, 200 specialized agents, and a new “Autonomous Enterprise” framework. But for many SAP customers, who are still navigating costly migrations to SAP’s S/4HANA cloud ERP, the more pressing question isn’t what AI can do. It’s whether they can get there from here. Budget constraints are now the top challenge facing SAP customers, cited by 61% of respondents in the Americas’ SAP Users’ Group (ASUG) 2026 Pulse of the SAP Customer survey, 7 percentage points higher than last year. And the culprit isn’t macroeconomic pressure, according to ASUG. It’s the migrations themselves. “From our research, it’s more so that S/4HANA projects are creating the budget pressures,” said ASUG’s research director Marissa Gilbert . “And we’ll see AI impacting them next.” Stuck in pilot mode Separate ASUG research on AI adoption , conducted in February 2026 in collaboration with Microsoft and Intel, reveale