Download the full 2026 SAP Trends Report here.

This free trends report outlines industry perspectives and expert advice from our team of SAP consultants. You can view an excerpt of the report below, and if you’d like to discuss any of the trends or other challenges in the SAP space, connect with our team today.

Key SAP Trends

As organizations in the consumer products, retail, and life sciences industries move into 2026, the focus needs to shift from planning to taking decisive action on SAP initiatives. The approaching ECC end-of-maintenance deadline makes it clear that delays are costly, but it also creates an opportunity to simplify environments that have become difficult to manage due to years of customizations and extended product lifecycles, among other reasons. Organizations should take a hard look at which processes truly need to remain in the core and which can be supported through extensions or integrations. 

Clarkston’s SAP consultants have highlighted the top trends that businesses should consider and keep top-of-mind throughout the year:

1. The ECC Deadline Nears
2. Embedding AI into Everyday Operations
3. SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) Partnerships
4. Clean Core Strategy
5. New Solutions and Capabilities for a Modern SAP Landscape 
6. AI-Driven Supply Chains 

Trend 1:

The ECC Deadline Nears

As SAP moves into 2026, both its commercial strategy and technology roadmap point in the same direction: moving the remaining ECC customer base forward while making S/4HANA and Business Technology Platform (BTP) the center of gravity for innovation. In 2025, many organizations were still operating large, highly customized ECC landscapes that have been stable for years but increasingly hard to evolve. We continue to see clients juggling workarounds, third-party tools, and deferred enhancements simply to keep those environments running. 

Even with industry estimates suggesting that roughly 60% of SAP customers remain on ECC, the tone of the conversation has changed. SAP is leaning harder into incentives, bundled offerings, and migration accelerators to address the remaining backlog and bring customers onto platforms where new capabilities (like AI-driven features and advanced analytics) are actually being delivered. 

Although the ECC support window has been extended, most clients recognize it as planning time rather than a true extension of the status quo. The reality is that meaningful innovation is happening almost entirely in S/4HANA and BTP, and organizations that continue to wait risk spending too much time and too many resources maintaining systems that no longer align with how SAP, or their own businesses, want to operate. 

Trend 2:

Embedding AI into Everyday Operations

One of the most noticeable changes heading into 2026 is how AI is moving from something people interact with to something that quietly runs in the background of everyday operations. In 2025, most organizations used generative AI in fairly limited ways. Teams would ask questions in plain language or rely on AI for guidance, but the actual work still depended on someone translating those insights into action inside SAP.  

As we move into 2026, that model is starting to break down. AI is becoming embedded directly into SAP processes, with agents that understand what’s happening in the system and can act without being prompted step by step. Instead of explaining a problem to a generic chatbot, the system can identify issues on its own and move work forward within the application. SAP’s AI assistant, Joule, reflects this shift. It’s evolving from an advisory tool into something that can take on routine operational work and support entire process flows, reducing the need for constant human intervention. 

For many clients, this evolution is driven by practical constraints rather than experimentation. Teams are under pressure to do more with the same resources, and manual handoffs inside core processes are becoming harder to justify. Embedding AI into daily operations is increasingly viewed as a way to keep work moving and remove friction from SAP processes. Organizations that delay this shift will struggle to keep pace with peers who have embedded intelligence into how work gets done. 

Continue reading by downloading the full report below.

Download the Full 2026 SAP Trends Report Here

Read last year’s SAP Trends Report here.

Contributions from Jacob Gallagher and Steve Barrett