SAP's migration assistants: what the AI prepares, someone has to sign off

What happened

In the SAP News Center on 28 October 2026, SAP reports that four migration and modernisation assistants for data management, test management, custom code and business configuration are available to early adopter customers and, according to the article, are already being used in live cloud ERP transformation projects.

Who is affected

The article addresses companies moving to SAP Cloud ERP, and with them the programme leadership that has to hold data migration, testing and development together. It describes how the Data Management Assistant prioritises quality issues by business impact and helps carry out corrections through automated or guided remediation. According to SAP, the Test Management Assistant derives test scope, test cases and the required test data from business processes, requirements and user stories. The Custom Code Assistant classifies findings by complexity for the transition to SAP Cloud ERP Private and generates corrections; the Business Configuration Assistant recommends settings, applies them autonomously, flags deviations and maintains a full audit trail. Further assistants for system analysis, project management and rollouts are planned, according to the article. It does not say when the assistants will be available beyond early adopter customers or how they will be licensed.

What to do

As long as the assistants are open only to early adopter customers, we would not write them into a programme's schedule or budget as an assumption. What can be clarified now is how their results would fit into project governance. If a tool derives test cases from user stories, the quality of the test cases depends on the quality of those inputs; if the special cases are missing there, they are missing from the test as well. If a tool changes configuration or code autonomously, there needs to be an agreement beforehand on who signs off these changes from a business perspective and what counts as accepted. And if data errors are prioritised by business impact, the business has to define which impact matters. We would include these points in the test concept and acceptance procedure together with the implementation partner.

Our assessment

The article comes from SAP executives responsible for Cloud ERP Private, the ABAP platform and customer experience, and describes the assistants from the vendor's perspective; it gives no figures on effort saved or on the quality of the results. From large SAP programmes we know testing and cut-over as the phases in which it becomes clear whether business, IT and implementation partner mean the same thing by "done". In our view, assistants change little about that: they can speed up preparatory work, but which process has to run reliably before go-live remains the company's decision. We consider the audit trail the article mentions for the Business Configuration Assistant to be its most important point. For every assistant we would ask whether it makes traceable what it changed and why – only then can an acceptance be soundly justified.