SAP’s AI offer to legacy customers comes with a catch

More than 20,000 SAP customers are “stuck” on legacy ECC systems due to customizations, according to the CEO of SAP partner MyWave, Geraldine McBride, and many won’t migrate anytime soon. At Sapphire 2026, SAP offered them a path to AI, but only if they commit half their maintenance spend to the cloud first.

The offer, confirmed by SAP Chief Strategy Officer Sebastian Steinhaeuser during a media briefing, enables SAP to extend limited AI capabilities to customers still running its software on-premises during their transition to cloud ERP. But it comes with a significant condition: Customers must shift at least 50% of their maintenance spending to the cloud before they can enable Joule assistants on premises.

It’s a another small crack in SAP’s resolve: For years, it has been upsetting customers using its legacy systems by telling them the only way to access its latest innovations is to migrate to its latest platform, S/4HANA, in the cloud.

“There’s no confusion at all” about the latest change, said Steinhaeuser. “To be super clear, our Joule assistants and agents are designed for cloud. This is destiny and destiny is unchanged. […] However, we also want to meet customers where they are. We’ve put in a lot of work technically to make Joule available to ECC and S/4 customers who have committed to their journey.”

An SAP spokesperson confirmed the 50% requirement and said the company has no plans to extend the ECC end-of-service deadline beyond 2027, with extended support available through 2030 at additional cost.

For customers already on SAP’s Cloud ERP Private offering, the deal is sweeter. SAP will activate up to three Joule Assistants at no additional cost to cover common workflows in finance, HR, and the supply chain. New customers will be guided through activation during onboarding; existing customers can contact their SAP representative.

Meeting customers halfway to the cloud

SAP has spent years pushing customers toward S/4HANA, its cloud-based ERP successor to the aging ECC platform. But migration has proven difficult. The Americas’ SAP Users’ Group (ASUG) 2026 Pulse of the SAP Customer survey found that S/4HANA migration remains customers’ single biggest challenge, with 61% citing budget constraints and 48% struggling with integration.

Manoj Swaminathan, SAP’s chief product officer for Business Suite, struck a conciliatory tone ahead of Sapphire. “We want to take every customer along with us,” he said. “Some are in ECC, some on-prem, and some on the pathway as part of cloud ERP transformation. We want to work with every one of them so they can realize value now as they are modernizing.”

But for customers who haven’t committed significant cloud spending, that road to value remains gated.

Christopher Diaz, senior vice president of finance at Rio2, a Canadian mining company that recently implemented SAP’s public cloud, described the challenge for smaller organizations. “We plan to use the Joule assistant once we have the production information in the cloud,” he said. “Right now, we’re still tracking a bunch of production information in different spreadsheets.”

Carrot and stick

Industry analysts offered mixed assessments. Maribel Lopez, founder of Lopez Research, gave SAP some credit. “They are correct that it is very difficult for any vendor — SAP or any other software provider — to offer AI in an on-premises platform that wasn’t designed for this,” she said. “What SAP needs to do is find a way to migrate customers faster.”

Mickey North Rizza, group vice president of enterprise software at IDC, framed AI as both incentive and pressure. “AI is the new carrot and stick, reshaping businesses into a new operating model. Migration is an investment, and despite the great promise of cloud, many just haven’t done it,” she said, adding that IDC research found 31% of organizations moving from on-premises to cloud while 23% are actually moving back.

“Considering SAP is providing faster migration and testing as part of the movement to the cloud, and they are offering AI at different value propositions, they are taking into account the needs of their clients,” Rizza said.

Other vendors aren’t waiting

While SAP threads the needle between flexibility and protecting cloud revenue, third-party vendors are moving faster. MyWave, an SAP partner whose CEO Geraldine McBride is a former SAP president, offers AI agents that run natively on ECC without requiring migration or a 50% cloud commitment.

Many organizations “are kind of stuck on ECC due to Z codes and industry customizations,” McBride said. “We’re releasing value inside ECC today that can contribute to help migrate to S/4. It’s never migrate then transform — we transform then migrate.”

Ben McGrail, managing director at consulting firm Xmateria, estimates that as many as 40% of SAP customers will still be on ECC by 2030. “A good third aren’t even thinking about migration,” he said. “The biggest mistake SAP made was talking so hard about deadlines.”

Those who’ve tried and stalled, he added, often ran into a familiar problem: “They put it in front of the CFO, and he wants to know what the operational business gets out of it. [But] nothing is driving this from a business perspective.”

For those still running legacy systems, the message from Sapphire is clear: SAP’s AI future is available to you — but only if you’re already halfway to the cloud.