SAP Freezes Hiring and Travel to Fund Its AI Pivot
SAP has told staff to expect tighter belts on recruitment and business travel, redirecting that money toward artificial intelligence. An internal email seen by Bloomberg confirms the company will restrict new hires to what it calls "selected profiles only" — essentially AI roles deemed critical to its future. Non-AI travel is on hold too, and supplier spending is being squeezed.
When The Register asked for comment, SAP offered the predictable corporate gloss: something about prioritising AI capabilities and applying "greater discipline" to spending. Which is a polished way of saying they're cutting things that aren't AI.
The pivot follows SAP's May launch of what it's branding the Autonomous Enterprise — a concept built around a new Business AI Platform designed to sit on top of its existing ERP, CRM, and HCM products. The headline tool is Joule Studio 2.0, aimed at developers building and managing AI agents. It supports Model Context Protocol and the Agent2Agent standard, which in practice means SAP's agents should be able to work alongside third-party tools without everything falling apart. Agentic orchestration and real-time data ingestion round out the package, with SAP pitching the whole thing as capable of running across hybrid IT environments.
All of which would be a cleaner story if SAP hadn't quietly missed its own cloud migration targets in the process. Back in 2022, then-CFO Luka Mucic told investors that on-premises support revenue would drop to around €8.5 billion by 2025, down sharply from €11.5 billion in 2021 as customers shifted to cloud subscriptions. The actual 2025 figure? €10.5 billion — down just 7 percent year-on-year and roughly €2 billion short of where SAP said it would be.
So the company is betting heavily on AI while its cloud transition runs behind schedule. That's not necessarily fatal, but it does mean SAP is spending aggressively to look like the future while its legacy business hasn't shrunk as fast as planned. Whether Joule Studio and a few frozen travel budgets are enough to sharpen the narrative remains to be seen.