In Cologne, the user association demanded feasibility and cost-effectiveness from SAP instead of just visions and target images
With this year’s annual congress, DSAG will have achieved another visitor record: More than 6,000 interested people were drawn to Koelnmesse from 6 to 8 October, where the main event of the user community took place for the first time. For the 17th time in total and this time under the motto “Claim Your Ground. Lead Your Business.” The focus was on the question of how user companies can determine their own course, pace and priorities in times of continuous transformation – and what contribution they, SAP and partners have to make to this.
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DSAG’s message: Classification instead of euphoria, benefit instead of buzzwords
With the congress motto, DSAG wanted to combine technological visions with a realistic view of the concrete challenges and opportunities of user companies. “It’s about classification instead of euphoria, benefit assessment instead of buzzwords and problem solutions instead of blind actionism. Companies must consciously define their scope for design and action and target investments,” says Jens Hungershausen, DSAG CEO. For him, it was also the last event of its kind in his previous position. Thomas Henzler was elected as his successor on 7 October.
In his keynote speech, Hungershausen demanded: “Investment decisions should not be based solely on visions and announced target visions. The decisive factors are feasibility, economic efficiency, integration capability and a demonstrable benefit for the respective business model.”
Complexity slows down innovation – S/4HANA on-premises remains part of everyday life
Walking through the two exhibition halls and talking to exhibiting companies, this assessment was confirmed. SAP customers are currently primarily concerned with the fact that they have to manage S/4HANA, cloud, AI or modernization projects in parallel, and this in an increasingly complex, dynamic and uncertain environment. They have a complexity and thus an innovation problem. This is precisely why the majority of user companies are simply not yet ready to keep up with SAP’s pace of innovation. The transformation also requires considerable investments. It is therefore crucial that these are offset by clearly comprehensible business added value and that they contribute to innovation, process harmonization and digital competitiveness in the long term.
54 percent are still using SAP ECC/ERP, as recently confirmed by the DSAG investment report. A narrow majority also opts for on-premises operation in terms of the operating model, although the proportion of private cloud customers is increasing. The public cloud, on the other hand, is still subordinate to S/4 transformations. S/4HANA on-prem and hybrid architectures are the current part of everyday life, whether SAP likes it or not. It is precisely this initial state that the exhibiting companies aimed at with their trade fair messages.
SAP announces Joule agents – DSAG calls for AI for on-premises as well
Thomas Pfiester, Head of Customer Engagement & Adoption and member of the Extended Board of SAP SE, announced at the DSAG Annual Congress that he wants to provide 50 assistants with 200 agents by the end of 2026, orchestrated via Joule as a new interaction layer. “Cloud ERP is the basis, AI is the engine,” is SAP’s credo. The most important questions at the moment are how to run assistants and agents in a secure environment and how both can be scaled beyond business areas. This does indeed seem to be a brake block at the moment, as only 16 percent of AI initiatives have been scaled company-wide so far and only 25 percent have generated the expected return on investment, Pfiester quoted an IBM study at his keynote in Cologne.
In the run-up to the annual congress, DSAG had demanded in this context that significant innovations must also be available to S/4HANA on-premises customers and not be tied exclusively to commercial cloud contracts. The provision of selected and technically feasible AI scenarios for SAP ECC or S/4HANA on-premises customers as part of RISE with SAP or GROW with SAP, which was announced at SAP Sapphire 2026, was therefore welcomed as an important, albeit only first, step.
