SAP Will Provide AI Capabilities for ECC and On-Premises S/4HANA Environments

SAP announced a change in its strategy for deploying artificial intelligence by expanding access to some of its AI functionalities to organizations that continue to use SAP ECC or on-premises installations of SAP S/4HANA.

Until now, the company maintained the position that new innovations and AI capabilities would be available only to customers using SAP’s cloud solutions through the RISE with SAP program. In 2023, SAP CEO Christian Klein stated that future innovations would not be provided for on-premises ERP environments or for systems hosted outside the company’s cloud strategy.

During the SAP Sapphire 2026 conference in Orlando, SAP introduced a more flexible approach. The company confirmed that a large portion of the AI assistants and AI agents developed on the Joule platform will also be able to operate with on-premises SAP ECC and SAP S/4HANA environments.

According to SAP, this capability will be aimed at organizations that have already started their modernization journey through RISE with SAP and have committed to transitioning to a cloud architecture. This will allow customers to use AI functionalities during the transformation process, without having to wait for the full completion of their migration to the cloud.

Mohammad Alam, member of SAP’s Executive Board responsible for product development and engineering, noted that a significant portion of Joule assistants and agents will be able to connect to on-premises S/4HANA and ECC systems within hybrid IT environments.

The new functionalities will be part of the SAP Business AI Platform – a new portfolio of services through which SAP aims to enable customers to start extracting value from AI solutions in the early stages of their modernization strategy.

Access to these capabilities will be tied to the new Max Success Plan package. According to the company, it will enable faster activation of AI assistants and agents and allow organizations to gradually deploy AI solutions across both cloud and eligible on-premises environments while transitioning to SAP’s cloud infrastructure.

General Availability of the new AI functionalities is planned for May 2026.

With this move, SAP takes an important step toward supporting organizations that still rely on on-premises ERP environments by providing them access to some of the latest AI technologies even before their full transition to cloud infrastructure.