Q&A: “Autonomous Does Not Mean Human-Free.” Inside the RISE Roadmap for the Middle East and Africa

Christian Klein gave Sapphire 2026 its most quotable line when he said no AI agent can compensate for a bad data landscape. For the Middle East and Africa markets that Pieter Van Der Merwe covers at SAP, that reads more like a starting gun. Van Der Merwe advises RISE with SAP customers across the UAE, a region split between government-mandated agentic AI in the Gulf and parts of Africa still securing their first foundational cloud workloads, yet all staring down the same 2027 ECC deadline.

In an interview with SAPinsider, he gave a working practitioner’s view of the market. He was candid about where RISE programs stall, why the first year is organizational change wearing a technology costume, and why prized customizations are often historical workarounds in disguise.

SAPinsider: SAP’s Africa messaging has intensified throughout 2026, and the autonomous enterprise framing surfaced early from MEA leadership. Is this a pivot, and why does the idea land here first?

Pieter Van Der Merwe: Africa has always been a growth market; what changed is the convergence of cloud ERP, business AI, data sovereignty and skills development. Some African enterprises carry less embedded legacy customization and can move faster. Others run highly customized environments built over years around payroll, procurement, and financial reporting.

The framing of a business that can sense, decide, and act with minimal human intervention resonates here for practical reasons, including resource constraints and the opportunity to leapfrog rather than replicate the mature-market journey. The opportunity is around clean cloud ERP, trusted data and embedded AI as the foundation for more agile, competitive organizations.

SAPi: Africa and the UAE are in very different places. What does a realistic autonomous enterprise roadmap look like for these regions in 2026?

Van Der Merwe: It starts with the unglamorous essentials such as modernizing the core and fixing the data foundation. Our CEO, Christian Klein, noted at Sapphire 2026 that no AI agent can compensate for a poor data landscape, so good data is the prerequisite for everything else.

The near-term value lies in the embedded AI scenarios that already live in RISE, such as finance automation, HR workflow and supply chain exception management. These are switched on inside existing SAP Cloud environments. The agentic layer arrives as the foundations mature. The African and Middle Eastern organizations well-positioned in 2028 are the ones investing in that foundation now, even when the autonomous vision feels distant.

SAPi: When a customer commits to RISE, what do the first 12 months look like, and where does it diverge from expectations?

Van Der Merwe: The first 12 months are a business transformation program disguised as a technology migration. The technology, SAP S/4HANA Cloud, infrastructure, and licensing are relatively straightforward. The depth of organizational change, such as how people work, how decisions are made, and how processes are structured, catches organizations off guard. Without governance and stakeholder engagement, even the best platform underdelivers.

The most common divergence is data readiness. Poor-quality, inconsistent master data surfaces early and erodes user trust, which is hard to recover from. The second is customization. Organizations underestimate how much of the current configuration is genuine business logic versus historical workaround, and that distinction is decisive for clean core. One welcome change post-Sapphire is that RISE customers get three Joule Assistants activated in their first year, giving a tangible AI experience during the foundational phase.

SAPi: Post-Sapphire, are customers feeling more urgency on the 2027 ECC deadline, or using the AI vision as a reason to pause?

Van Der Merwe: The 2027 deadline is real. SAP has made it clear that ECC customers who commit to migrating most of their landscape to SAP Cloud ERP gain access to select AI scenarios in the interim, so there is a bridge. The best-placed customers when agentic capabilities mature are those already running clean-core SAP S/4HANA, because that is the foundation the autonomous suite is built on. Waiting for the full vision before starting the foundation is the wrong sequence. If anything, the bigger risk is reorganizing priorities too ambitiously and trying to tackle everything at once.

SAPi: Clean core is the prerequisite for everything SAP promises, but in heavily customized landscapes, it can feel like undoing years of work. How do you win a buy-in?

Van Der Merwe: By reframing what those customizations represent. Some encode genuine differentiation, process logic that reflects how the business truly operates, and deserve to be preserved as extensions on SAP BTP using clean-core methodology. But much of the customization in mature landscapes is a historical workaround, through integration patches and decisions made under time pressure decades ago.

The conversation must involve finance, operations, and process owners. The framing that works is forward-looking: what does clean core unlock, specifically the AI scenarios now in RISE, and what does it cost to keep maintaining the current complexity? As support deadlines approach, that calculation changes sharply. The people dimension matters too. Teams whose identity is built around managing customized systems need a new value proposition of supervising AI-augmented processes rather than wrestling with complexity.

SAPi: The autonomous vision depends on trusted data and standardized processes. How prepared are organizations, and are some underestimating the foundational work?

Van Der Merwe: Both are genuinely hard, and neither is solved at contract signing. Data readiness is the most underestimated challenge. SAP’s platform response- SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC), Knowledge Graph and the Reltio acquisition- is meaningful, but zero-copy sharing and semantic enrichment do not substitute for master data governance.

Process standardization is the other half. The autonomous suite is built around standardized, cloud-aligned processes, so organizations that customized for years face a real renegotiation. The most forward-thinking organizations treat it as an opportunity to redesign processes for the AI era, rather than replicate old ones in a new system.

SAPi: Where do RISE programs most commonly stall, and what separates the customers who push through?

Van Der Merwe: The stall points cluster in three areas: data-readiness failures that force unplanned remediation; change-management breakdowns where the business disengages and IT drives alone; and integration complexity across mixed SAP and non-SAP landscapes. Those who push through have the qualities of change leadership, such as engaged executive sponsorship, quick decision-making governance, and a willingness to standardize where standardization is available. The technology is mature and stable; the implementation process and organizational alignment are where programs succeed or fail.

SAPi: Joule was positioned at Sapphire as SAP’s new front door. What does it mean for a customer mid-journey on RISE?

Van Der Merwe: Customers should be thinking about Joule now, even if full deployment is progressive. The positioning of Joule Work is a significant UX shift. For customers mid-journey, the practical question is which Joule capabilities are already available in their current RISE configuration and whether they are activating them, because the embedded scenarios and early assistant capabilities do not require a completed transformation. The broader Joule Work experience, across web, desktop, mobile and voice, moves to general availability in H2 2026. That timeline is closer than many realize.

SAPi: SAP has more than 295 AI-powered scenarios embedded across its applications. Which are getting real traction, and which are still promising on paper?

Van Der Merwe: The strongest traction is where AI is embedded directly into existing workflows, and the value is obvious: finance, HR, procurement, supply chain, and customer service, because they involve high-volume processes and measurable outcomes. Think faster financial close, guided buying and invoice processing in procurement, demand sensing and exception management in supply chain.

Where a use case stays more promising than practical, the problem lies with the customer environment. If data is fragmented, processes are inconsistent, or governance is immature, even strong AI struggles to deliver value at scale.

SAPi: The autonomous enterprise means AI executing actions humans perform today. How are the most forward-thinking customers approaching the human side?

Van Der Merwe: Organizations must treat AI as a work redesign strategy, not a replacement strategy. Employees move from repetitive execution toward supervision, exception handling, judgment, and continuous improvement. People must understand why the organization is changing and what skills keep them valuable, or AI copilots become another layer nobody trusts or uses.

It also demands reskilling, like learning to work with AI, interpreting its recommendations, and escalating exceptions where accountability still rests with people. The most mature organizations build cross-functional teams across business, technology, operations, compliance and change. The principle is simple: autonomous does not mean human-free. It means people focus on higher-value work while intelligent systems handle the repetitive and predictable.

SAPi: Have you seen the RISE-to-autonomous journey deliver something genuinely different from previous SAP transformation cycles?

Van Der Merwe: The example of IBM migrating from SAP ECC to SAP Cloud ERP Private across 175 countries and more than 150,000 users in 18 months is instructive. The move contributed to over $4.5 billion in productivity savings. What is different in this cycle is the speed and scope. A transformation at that scale would once have taken far longer, and the AI tooling now applied to the migration itself, reducing effort by up to 35% on SAP’s own figures, is part of that story.

In advanced deployments, the qualitative shift is from static reporting to active intervention. What feels genuinely new is the convergence of data, AI and process in a single governed environment, delivering systems that learn and adapt in real time.

SAPi: What is the one piece of advice you would give to a CIO or IT director in the Middle East and Africa navigating the 2027 deadline and autonomous vision?

Van Der Merwe: Do not treat these as separate issues. The 2027 deadline, the move to cloud ERP, and the autonomous enterprise are the same strategic decision: How ready your organization is for the next decade. The immediate priority is to modernize the core and fix the data foundation, because without it, AI stays trapped in isolated use cases. Then focus on business value: the processes where AI can protect revenue, improve cash flow, reduce risk, or unlock capacity. Do not modernize for technology’s sake.

Finally, bring people in early. This is as much a leadership, skills, and operating model shift as a technology one. My strongest advice is simple. Start now, start with the core, and build a roadmap that integrates migration, data, AI, and people into a single transformation agenda.