SAP customers warned AI agents could put costs on autopilot

Gartner has warned that SAP users adopting its AI agents could face spiraling costs as the vendor moves to a new commercial model. Last week, the German ERP giant announced plans for its Autonomous Enterprise, including an AI platform for building and governing a suite of agents that do business work. With the new platform comes a new commercial model in which SAP no longer charges according to how many users are authorized to access the platform, but by the value agents offer by completing "actions." SAP has confirmed to The Register that AI Unit purchases are estimated based on the expected number of "agent actions for an autonomous domain." The company promised to introduce "Autonomous Domain Blueprints" that would help estimate costs in so-called "Tshirt size guidance" indicative of the customer's scale of deployment. However, a recent paper from Gartner warns: "Depending on how SAP defines an 'action,' the number of events incurring fees risks quickly spiraling upwards. This would lead to unexpectedly increased costs, especially if SAP continues to charge higher unit prices for AI Units used in excess of the customer's contractual commitment, or if AI agents consume a digital access license. Moreover, the value a customer derives from an executed action might not match how SAP has priced that action." Victoria Rowan, Gartner senior principal analyst, is lead author of the report, "First Take: SAP Moves to Higher-Value-Based AI Pricing, but Potential Cautions Remain." The research outfit has promised to update its analysis as SAP publishes more details about its pricing model. It is also waiting for a response to a fact review from the company. SAP provides ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems that help run some of the world's largest companies, including Walmart and VW Group. Over the past five years, it has been trying to get customers to move to the cloud and off legacy software. More recently, it has made a big push for AI adoption. In its research, Gartner said users need to take care in how they cost AI adoption with SAP, which provides AI Units as a commercial metric. "The AI Units customers purchase are converted to the license metric of the particular SAP Premium AI services they consume. SAP's contracts give SAP the ability to alter the conversion factors, meaning SAP could end up charging more during the term and at the point of contractual renewal," the paper says. An SAP spokesperson said conversion rates were intended to reflect the usage of the applicable AI features. "Any changes to conversion rates would only take effect upon renewal for existing customers, as further described in the applicable AI Units order form." Gartner also pointed out that there was a lack of "clear definitions of how the customer-built agents' work will be measured." While this remains the case, "it will be difficult to predict and control runtime costs." The SAP spokesperson said the runtime metrics for Joule Studio - SAP's agent builder platform - had not yet been disclosed. Announcing SAP's Business AI platform last week, CEO Christian Klein promised customers could unlock new sources of revenue and make "meaningful cost savings." Gartner advises users thinking about adopting SAP's AI platform to review their existing contracts to check whether they have price-protection clauses for their SAP Cloud applications, such as S/4HANA. They should also get a baseline for the conversion of AI Units by obtaining a copy of the current SAP AI Services List from the SAP Trust Center and reviewing the current conversion factors. (R)