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SAP Supervisory Board Demands AI Breakthrough in Months, Not Years
SAP's supervisory board members believe the company must show a real AI breakthrough within the next few months, or risk permanently losing ground to Microsoft, Google and Salesforce. Pressure is mounting after SAP shares lost more than half their value in under eighteen months.
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Members of SAP's supervisory board, Europe's largest business software maker, believe the company needs a clear breakthrough in artificial intelligence within the next few months, not years. Bloomberg, citing people familiar with internal discussions at the company, reported on September 8, 2026 growing pressure on Christian Klein's management team, as SAP's stock has fallen from a record high to less than half its value from eighteen months earlier.
Pressure Despite Strong Results
The paradox of SAP's situation is that the company's core business is performing well. Cloud revenue is growing at a double-digit rate, and the customer base using SAP systems for finance, logistics, manufacturing and human resources remains huge and loyal. The problem isn't today's sales, but the pace at which artificial intelligence is changing how business software gets used.
Investors worry that AI agents and new model providers could bypass SAP's traditional interfaces, reaching directly into company data and automating processes that previously required licensed SAP modules. It's this scenario, rather than current financial results, that has some supervisory board members talking about a window measured in months.
A Billion Euros for Prior Labs
In May 2026, SAP announced the acquisition of Prior Labs, a young German AI startup founded in 2024 by researcher Frank Hutter along with Noah Hollmann and Sauraj Gambhir. The deal, worth about $1.16 billion, closed in July. Prior Labs specializes in what are known as tabular foundation models, a technique designed for structured business data, exactly the type of information that sits inside SAP systems.
The company said it would spend more than a billion euros developing the Freiburg lab around Prior Labs' technology, with the startup continuing to operate as an independent unit. It's SAP's biggest bet yet that its own AI models, tailored to the specifics of corporate data, will deliver an edge that general-purpose language models bought from outside vendors can't match.
Executive Board Reorganization
The time pressure is also visible in the company's power structure. In March 2026, SAP reorganized its executive board so that CEO Christian Klein could focus directly on AI development, and in June it handed oversight of AI products jointly to the CEO and the chief operating officer. The company also froze hiring and business travel to free up funds for AI investment.
It's clear that AI agents need to draw on many types of data - Christian Klein, CEO of SAP
These moves haven't stopped the stock's decline, though. SAP shares rank among the worst performers among large software companies in 2026, even as the company has repeatedly raised its cloud revenue guidance. Investors are shifting capital toward chipmakers, leaving traditional enterprise software companies like SAP, Salesforce and ServiceNow under sustained market pressure.
What This Means for Clients in Poland
For Polish companies running SAP systems, which include a large share of industry, energy and retail, the tension inside the group carries practical weight. How fast SAP manages to build AI agents into its finance, logistics and HR modules will affect when and on what terms Polish customers get new features, and how quickly license prices tied to usage-based models will rise.
The competition for position in enterprise software is no longer just between traditional ERP vendors, but also with Microsoft, Google and Salesforce, which offer their own layers of AI agents running on top of existing systems. If customers decide it's easier to automate processes through an outside agent than through SAP's native features, some of the value could flow outside the German company's ecosystem.
SAP's supervisory board isn't speaking with one voice: some members believe a real technological breakthrough could still take up to two years of work, while others want visible results within the next few months. The next test for Klein's management team will be the financial results and any announcements of new AI features in the coming quarters, which will show whether the investment in Prior Labs and the board reorganization are translating into real competitive advantage.
