Thoughts Post A-Day & Sapphire: The AI Agenda Is Set, But Seeing Will Be Believi

Research evidence excerpt

Thoughts Post A-Day & Sapphire: The AI Agenda Is Set, But Seeing Will Be Believi

e strategic over time. At the same time, there are no new agentic KPI’s that can help outline

SAP’s near-term progress and counteract the ongoing AI disintermediation thesis. Given the degree of control SAP has over its

installed base and cost structure, the question of longer-term margin potential, and whether the model should support structurally

higher operating margins, remains an open debate for investors. At ~16x CY27 EPS, we do not see a ton of downside risk at these

levels, but we also do not see a compelling catalyst to argue for a higher multiple in the near-term. Please see below/inside for

more takeaways.

ERP as the platform layer for AI: The central architectural message was that enterprise applications, and ERP specifically, evolve

into the platform layer for AI systems rather than being displaced by them. SAP introduced its Business AI Platform as a unification

of its application layer, data layer, and AI capabilities, with a particular emphasis on the knowledge graph and semantic data model

that connect business processes and data across systems. Management’s argument is that enterprise AI requires deterministic

systems of record, governance, and process context, not just access to LLMs. In this framing, agents operate on top of SAP’s

systems, relying on the core ERP platform to provide context, validation, and execution.

Migration, suite expansion, and AI are increasingly linked: In the go-to-market discussion, management discussed explicitly

the linkage between migration, AI deployment, and consumption, whereby SAP is focused on reducing friction in the migration

process itself and accelerating time to value.