SAP TechEd 2026 gave enterprise technology teams a long list of ideas to take home. SAP's October 27 announcements and session catalog put agent building, enterprise knowledge, integration, and AI governance in the foreground [1–2]. For a US CIO preparing a 2027 budget, the next decision is where to fund work that can deliver measurable value on the SAP landscape the company actually operates. A useful starting point is to fund one business outcome, one reusable capability, and one clearly defined production gate. Give each an owner and a spending limit. Review the evidence after 90 days before making a larger commitment.
The distinction between a conference demonstration and an investment decision shows up in mundane details. Who answers an alert on Friday night? Does the supported interface expose the information a workflow needs? Can finance measure savings when an employee still reviews every suggestion? Those questions turn an attractive idea into a proposal the business can evaluate. The following plan is designed for a US enterprise with SAP S/4HANA or ECC, a mix of cloud and on-premises applications, and a small architecture team already supporting other priorities.
Sort the announcements into decisions you can make
Start with a one-page summary of what the company could change in the next two quarters. Divide it into improvements available in your current environment, candidates that need a limited technical evaluation, and items that depend on a future release or contract. SAP's event materials and its Sapphire keynote provide direction on how the company sees the relationship between applications, data, and AI [1–3]. Validate each proposed capability against the documentation and commercial terms for the actual edition, region, and tenant before treating it as deployable.
For example, imagine a manufacturer considering an assistant to help customer service investigate delayed orders. A business stakeholder saw a conference example that appeared to reason across several systems. In the company's landscape, customer orders live in SAP, carriers publish milestones through two integration channels, and promise dates are revised in a third application. A low-cost discovery task can establish whether the required information can be accessed in a consistent way. A full budget for agent development is premature until the team knows which system owns each date and how stale an update can be before it misleads a customer.
Keep a record of the difference between what was announced and what the evaluation proves. An architecture diagram may show where a future capability belongs. Your decision log should show the dependency, who verifies it, and the date by which a change in scope or schedule becomes necessary. When the evidence is missing, price discovery separately. This preserves the option to stop or switch use cases without holding a larger program hostage to a single assumption.
Make the first funded use case small enough to measure
Define a decision that already takes place and identify where the time or cost accumulates. In the delayed order example, the process could begin when a representative opens an exception and end when they assemble an explanation for the account team. The pilot output could be a short brief with the order, the latest carrier milestone, the expected delivery date, and a link to the supporting record. The representative verifies it before using it. This gives the team a measurable scope while avoiding direct impact on shipment or customer communications.
Take a baseline from a representative mix of cases. Record median investigation time, repeat checks, and how often staff must contact another department. Sample mundane cases as well as difficult ones such as partial shipments, manually changed promise dates, and carrier milestones that arrive out of sequence. Assign an operations manager to validate the baseline. Otherwise, impressive percentages can depend on a narrow set of unusually time-consuming cases.
Express the outcome in terms that finance can review. If forty analysts collectively handle 800 exceptions a month and a pilot removes three minutes of investigation per eligible case, the gross opportunity is 40 hours monthly at full eligibility. At half eligibility, it is 20 hours before subtracting time for review, rework, and support. This example uses hypothetical figures. The same arithmetic helps a team decide whether the use case deserves product investment, a smaller workflow improvement, or more research.
Fund one capability the next project can reuse
A project with a clear outcome can still leave behind assets nobody can use. Choose one investment that should outlive the pilot. Examples include a stable integration that exposes a documented order status, an evaluation set of representative exceptions, or an identity pattern that lets teams grant and revoke access for assistants. The asset should have an owner who can support it without depending on the original developer.
SAP's architecture guidance for building AI agents describes platform services and patterns that can support development and delivery [4]. Use it to shape a technical spike. Record the systems queried, the authorization model, expected timeouts, and the output format. If a service exposes both customer-facing and internal values, document which fields the use case can return. A prototype running against a broad development account will rarely answer questions about production access.
Write a basic interface agreement even when both sides belong to the same company. For an order-status service, define the key, the meaning of each status, freshness expectations, the behavior when a carrier message is missing, and what counts as a breaking change. Agree on how teams will find incidents and who handles recurring errors. A second project will be able to reuse the service with fewer assumptions, and the first project will be easier to support after its original team rolls off.
Put the business owner in charge of the production gate
A program sponsor can approve an experiment. The person accountable for the workflow should approve operational use. Ask that owner to agree in advance on acceptable error patterns and when employees should fall back to the current process. For the order case, a vague explanation might require a quick correction. Presenting a previous shipment milestone as current could mislead a customer about a delivery and deserves a more stringent gate. Capture the difference in the evaluation rubric.
Build a review sample around normal, ambiguous, and restricted cases. Log the expected behavior before running the pilot. Include an order the reviewer is allowed to see and one they cannot access. Include a shipment for which the status feed is late. Include a case in which source records disagree. Record whether the system displays the source, expresses uncertainty, or escalates. An answer that sounds fluent can still be wrong about the actual order.
Production criteria should cover performance and ongoing support as well as quality. Define what happens during an outage, how the system is disabled, and whether support can trace an incorrect recommendation back to the source and software version. Identify the monitoring owner and escalation path. Keep the criteria visible to finance and security so a decision to extend the pilot is based on comparable evidence and known costs. SAP's public roadmap context is useful, but your acceptance criteria should reflect your own process.
Sequence the 90 days around evidence
During the first month, assemble the baseline, validate availability, and choose the smallest usable workflow. Assign a business lead, a technical owner, a security reviewer, and someone from finance who can validate the calculation. Ask the team to demonstrate a single complete case using representative data and realistic permissions. A missing prerequisite at this stage is a finding with a cost and date attached. It may reveal a better first project in integration or data quality.
During the second month, build the bounded workflow and run it alongside the current process. Avoid changing production authority during the evaluation. Have users record time spent and errors they catch. Add edge cases as they surface, and rerun the original cases when configuration changes. Hold a short weekly meeting focused on what has changed in the evidence, which issue is blocking a credible decision, and whether the business case still holds at the actual eligible volume.
In the third month, test recovery, review permissions, and complete the cost estimate. Consider development effort, consumption, maintenance, monitoring, and the ongoing time people spend reviewing output. Present three possible decisions to the sponsor. Extend the pilot if the outcome is measurable but a specific operational question remains. Move to limited production if ownership and acceptance criteria are satisfied. Close the experiment if costs or data gaps exceed the expected benefit, and preserve the reusable assets for another application.
Frequently asked questions
What should a SAP team prioritize after TechEd?
Prioritize a measurable process improvement that fits the installed SAP landscape and can be evaluated with real cases. Verify the product availability and permissions first. Fund only the discovery work until the team can show which records the workflow needs and how employees will use the output. This gives leadership a credible way to compare the proposal with other demands on the same SAP team.
Should a company wait for its SAP S/4HANA migration to finish?
It depends on the dependency. A team can often collect baseline data, map the workflow, and define acceptance cases before the migration ends. Building on interfaces that will be replaced may create rework. Ask the migration lead to identify stable boundaries and schedule the pilot around those. A short discovery effort can produce evidence that serves the migration and the future automation program.
Which result should go into the budget request?
Show the observed outcome, the share of cases eligible, the cost to operate the capability, and the conditions for scaling. A short demo can illustrate the workflow. The approval case should also show what happens when the data is missing, how staff recover, and who will own the service after the project team moves on.
GBSI can help your team translate its SAP roadmap into a 90-day investment plan with explicit technical dependencies, acceptance criteria, and business measures [5]. Discuss your SAP roadmap with GBSI.
References
1. SAP Empowers AI Developers | SAP TechEd
3. 2026 SAP Sapphire Keynote: Powering the Autonomous Enterprise
4. Build AI Agents on SAP Business AI Platform
5. GBSI SAP Integration Suite modernization playbook
