Gauging the attitudes, preferences, and plans of ASUG members as they relate to SAP technology, ASUG’s eighth annual Pulse of the SAP Customer research provided valuable insights into the priorities of executives at the modern enterprise.
In the ASUG community, executives are increasingly focused on the future state of their organizations and seeking to leverage investments in AI while seeking to maximize the value of overall business transformation within their approaches to cloud migration.
“The theme we see in this research is that executives are, as they should be, forward-thinking,” explained Carolyn Dolezal, ASUG Chief Operating Officer, during the recent ASUG Executive Exchange Summit. “They might be more interested in some different areas that may not always have yet translated to the organization. It’s a good reminder that, as leaders, you may be thinking ahead and then needing to think also about how to bring the team along with you.”
To that end, although moving to SAP S/4HANA remains top of mind for the majority of ASUG members in 2025, executives (39%) tend to emphasize this focus area less than overall respondents (47%), and they’re slightly less concerned (54%) than others (57%) about the importance of SAP S/4HANA expertise to their organizations. That said, SAP S/4HANA is the top reason that organizations are making more investments in SAP.
Business process standardization, meanwhile, is a significantly greater priority for executives (49%) than for the average respondent (36%), though executives (43%) considered business process management a highly important skill to harness in their organizations in alignment with total respondents (41%). It also follows that executives are expressing more intent to tackle business process management with SAP Signavio (47%) than the average ASUG Member (41%), though broader interest in this SAP product is on the rise.
Asked about the most important technology impacting digital transformation, respondents across the board cited data analytics and dashboards (67%, up from 62% in 2024), and this sentiment was even more widely shared by executives (79%), who similarly identified gaining actionable insights from data and analytics as a common organizational challenge (57%), much more readily than the average respondent (35%, up from 20% in 2024), though the surge of attention to this area is evident across organizations. Executives also noted the importance of building skills in data science and data analytics (48%), thinking ahead to a challenge that the average respondent is starting to recognize (36%).
“There’s a deep recognition that this business process management issue is important,” said Dolezal. “What are they going to do, and how are they going to do it? Skills are important for the organization in this realm… That’s the big question on executives’ minds: how do I gain actionable insights from all this data that we’re collecting?”
With the announcement of SAP Business Data Cloud, SAP specifically seeks to address this question; bringing together SAP Datasphere, SAP Analytics Cloud, and SAP Business Warehouse in a unified experience, the new solution is designed to create a common semantical data layer that harmonizes data from mission-critical applications while breaking down business silos. In addition to enhancing data-analytics capabilities and potentially redefining enterprise data management, the solution will provide a trusted data foundation for artificial-intelligence applications—another area executives are uniquely focused on, compared to others in their organizations.
Naturally, executives have a vested interest in harnessing AI capabilities, and 57% of executives are focused on the impact of AI and machine-learning (ML) capabilities on digital transformation, compared to 46% of total respondents. In terms of skills-building, 48% of executives see AI as a core area to build internal capabilities around, compared to 30% of total respondents, and executives are already focused on tackling organizational challenges like identifying high-value use cases for AI integration (41%) and quality and completeness of data for AI initiatives (28%).
“Taking a look at AI and what we were able to discern there, data governance is a significant challenge we’ve been seeing, because of the implementation of AI technology,” explained Dolezal. “There’s a need for better organizational setup and proper data management and governance.”
It's a similar story on cybersecurity and data protection; for 41% of executives, this is a focus area for 2025 (compared to 33% of total respondents), and correspondingly company leaders see cybersecurity as an area to build skills around (49%) and also point to cybersecurity and data protection as a larger organizational challenge to tackle (33%).
For more insights from the 2025 ASUG Pulse of the SAP Customer Research, explore the full report and dive into an exclusive episode of the ASUG Talks podcast with ASUG CEO & Chief Community Champion Geoff Scott and ASUG Director of Research Marissa Gilbert.