SAP’s New Chief Customer Officer Frees Klein to Focus on AI

SAP has appointed Thomas Saueressig as Chief Customer Officer and created a new Customer Value Group, a move designed to align the customer lifecycle from initial sales engagement through long-term value realization.

The move brings together SAP’s Customer Success and Customer Services & Delivery organizations under Saueressig, placing authority over sales, services, and delivery under a single executive. In doing so, CEO Christian Klein is effectively transferring day-to-day oversight of SAP’s sales organization to Saueressig.

This shift follows a period in which Klein and other Walldorf executives were increasingly pulled into major deal negotiations and transformation engagements throughout 2025. By elevating Saueressig into this role, SAP is freeing Klein to focus more directly on technology strategy and the company’s long-term product direction.

The timing of the change is also notable. SAP, like many traditional enterprise software providers, is navigating a period of significant disruption as generative AI reshapes how enterprise software is developed, sold, and monetized. Against this backdrop, Klein’s decision to reorganize leadership around the customer lifecycle reflects both internal execution challenges and broader industry pressures.

Saueressig is certainly a rising star within SAP, and this announcement further solidifies his position within the company’s leadership hierarchy. However, the changes appear to be less about Saueressig himself and more driven by several underlying factors:

1. Recognition that the recently implemented co-CRO model with Jan Gilg and Manos Raptopoulos was not delivering as intended. This dynamic became increasingly visible in SAP’s recent earnings results and the heavy involvement required from Walldorf leadership to support key deals throughout 2025.
2. An understanding of what is at stake from a services perspective as SAP seeks to strengthen its capabilities supporting customer technical migrations.
3. A growing recognition that SAP must evolve how it licenses and sells AI, shifting toward models based on business outcomes and autonomous services in order to accelerate adoption across its installed base.

Viewed together, these factors suggest the leadership change is less about organizational simplification and more about addressing execution gaps revealed through customer feedback, recent financial performance, and the growing industry pressure to adapt to AI-driven business models.

Why the Co-CRO Model Required Too Much of Klein’s Time

SAP’s co-CRO structure, announced just over a year ago, was originally designed to align revenue growth more closely with customer success. By appointing Jan Gilg and Manos Raptopoulos to lead the global Customer Success organization under Christian Klein, SAP sought greater accountability for customer adoption, expansion, and long-term value realization.

There were notable successes, particularly in the early momentum with AI and Business Data Cloud initiatives. However, execution challenges began to emerge throughout 2025. Disruptions in the sales process became increasingly evident, and SAP itself acknowledged that negotiations were taking longer as transactions became more difficult to structure and execute in the current environment.

In addition to concerns around cloud backlog performance and a 2026 outlook that has raised questions about long-term growth, North America once again failed to match the growth seen in EMEA and APJ under Jan Gilg’s leadership.

As a result, customers observed more frequent involvement from SAP’s Walldorf executives, including CEO Christian Klein, in major transformation engagements. While executive support in strategic deals is not unusual, the scale of involvement throughout 2025 suggested that Klein and other senior leaders were spending increasing amounts of time helping close transactions and guide negotiations.

For a CEO simultaneously trying to reposition SAP as an AI-driven company, that level of operational involvement in sales creates a clear constraint, one the restructuring under Saueressig appears designed to address by placing a single executive in charge of the full customer lifecycle and allowing Klein to refocus on technology strategy, product innovation, and long-term competitive positioning.

With this move, clients in North America should expect to see more of Thomas Saueressig, who will undoubtedly work closely with the newly appointed President of North America, David Robinson, to increase sales intensity in the region. What remains uncertain is the role Jan Gilg will play in future sales cycles, particularly in light of questions about his involvement and effectiveness throughout 2025.

Why SAP is Seeking to Play a Larger Role in Customer Migrations

Another major factor behind the leadership change is the growing importance of strengthening SAP’s capabilities, reputation, and revenue in service delivery. This includes taking a more active role as the technical lead in migration programs, working alongside system integrators to help ensure operational continuity, and expanding the scope of its premium service offerings to support customers through increasingly complex transformation initiatives.

As organizations approach the end-of-support deadlines for ECC environments, many are focused on ensuring that a transition to RISE does not disrupt mission-critical business processes. These transformations are increasingly complex, with large enterprise environments involving extensive integrations, customizations, and tightly connected workflows where even small disruptions can create downstream impacts across finance, supply chain, and other core systems.

Recognizing these concerns, SAP is positioning itself to play a larger role in guiding migrations by consolidating customer success and delivery capabilities under a single organization and expanding its premium support services.

SAP is also expected to take a more leading role in technical brownfield migrations for S/4HANA on-premise customers approaching end-of-life milestones, as these engagements are typically less complex and easier to structure and sell.

This strategy is also reflected in SAP’s evolving services and support portfolio. Recently, SAP reconfigured its services and support offerings for the third time in five years, introducing an updated model focused on its cloud solutions and newly embedded AI capabilities. While the new structure provides customers with more flexibility to mix and match across three service tiers, it also introduces greater reliance on subscription and percentage-based pricing, which may increase long-term costs as SAP becomes more embedded in the delivery of customer transformation programs.

Together, these changes signal SAP’s intent to expand its influence across the full migration lifecycle while increasing its role and revenue opportunity in services supporting customers transitioning to RISE and ensuring operational continuity for those already running on the platform.

How Accelerating AI Adoption Will Require a Different Sales Model

The third factor behind the leadership change relates to SAP’s broader strategy for accelerating AI adoption across its portfolio.

During recent earnings discussions, SAP acknowledged that the traditional enterprise software model, where solutions are primarily sold through licenses or subscriptions, may not be sufficient to drive widespread AI adoption. Instead, the company indicated that AI solutions will increasingly need to be sold and measured based on business outcomes and the delivery of autonomous services.

This shift reflects a broader industry reality. Many traditional software companies are facing increasing pressure to adapt their business models as AI-driven platforms and cloud-native competitors reshape the enterprise technology landscape.

As CEO Christian Klein recently stated, “The AI evolution is moving rapidly, and we need to keep pace. We once again need to transform SAP end to end, going all in on AI.”

Delivering on that vision will require more than product innovation. It requires tighter alignment across sales teams, implementation partners, and customer operations to ensure AI capabilities are successfully embedded into enterprise workflows and deliver measurable operational improvements.

Consolidating authority across the customer lifecycle, spanning sales, delivery, and customer success, positions SAP to better align commercial commitments with operational outcomes, which will be critical to accelerating AI adoption across its installed base.

These changes are also unfolding alongside broader leadership shifts within SAP’s product organization. Board member Muhammad Alam, who leads product and engineering, has announced that he will not renew his contract when it expires in March 2027 due to personal reasons, adding another layer of transition as SAP reshapes its leadership structure to support its AI-driven strategy.

Closing Thoughts

SAP’s decision to create a new Customer Value Group and elevate Thomas Saueressig reflects a company recalibrating how it drives growth at a critical phase of its evolution.

The move comes as SAP responds to several realities at once:

1. Execution challenges under the co-CRO model required greater executive involvement in sales during 2025.
2. Large-scale S/4HANA migrations are becoming more complex.
3. AI is forcing traditional enterprise software companies to rethink how their platforms are sold, delivered, and monetized.

For SAP customers, the implications of this change extend beyond organizational structure. As SAP centralizes authority and deepens its involvement in migrations, services, and AI adoption, organizations should expect shifts in how SAP approaches large transformation programs, from deal structuring and migration guidance to the role SAP plays alongside system integrators.

In the near term, customers should specifically expect to see:

1. New SAP stakeholders entering the sales cycle,
2. Increased pressure to accelerate deal timelines,
3. Greater emphasis on positioning AI, Business Data Cloud (BDC), and SAP’s updated services and support portfolio,
4. Increased attempts by SAP to play a larger role in the migration process,
5. Additional downstream changes to SAP’s commercial models and leadership structure.

As SAP reshapes its customer engagement model and seeks to accelerate AI adoption and cloud backlog growth following softer-than-expected earnings, organizations must balance SAP’s positioning with a strategy aligned to their own roadmap that captures value and negotiating leverage while maintaining flexibility in an increasingly complex SAP landscape.

As SAP evolves its customer engagement and AI strategy, organizations must ensure their SAP roadmap and commercial strategy stay aligned. UpperEdge is here to help organizations navigate these changes by developing and executing commercial strategies that maximize negotiating leverage, strengthen SAP relationships, and drive successful transformation outcomes. Learn how UpperEdge’s SAP Advisory Practice can help.