Key takeaways
- —The past year of Microsoft Dynamics and SAP community gatherings — Community Summit, SAPinsider, ASUG, and the regional user groups — surfaced noticeable shifts.
- —The hype around AI in ERP delivery cooled in the right way. The community moved from AI will save us to AI has to earn its place.
- —ERP horror stories were everywhere last year and we expect them this year. The community keeps telling them, openly, and that's still one of the healthiest things about this ecosystem.
- —The recurring signal across both ecosystems came down to four things: implementation data should be an asset, repeatable playbooks beat heroic effort, risk should surface early, and the people running these programs need to see the same picture.
- —Looking ahead, the next year of community gatherings is shaping up to be where customers stop asking whether AI belongs in delivery and start asking how to use it well. That's the conversation we're getting ready for.
The past year of Microsoft Dynamics and SAP community gatherings — Community Summit, SAPinsider, ASUG, SAP TechEd, the regional user groups — felt different from the year before. Not in any one big way, but the conversation grew up. People came in with sharper questions, more honest assessments, and less appetite for the easy story. As we look back at what surfaced this past year and ahead at what's coming, that maturation is the thread that runs through everything.
The year the conversation grew up
Two years ago, every panel had AI in the title and every booth had an AI message on the wall. The energy was promotional. The questions were aspirational. The customers, mostly, were trying to figure out whether to pay attention.
This past year, that changed. The AI sessions are still there, but the questions in the room are different. How does this actually integrate into our existing delivery process? What's the failure mode if it gets a recommendation wrong? How do we know it's surfacing the right risks? Who's accountable when the AI flagged something and nobody acted on it? These are operator questions. They're the questions you ask when you've stopped being impressed and started doing the work.
That shift happened across both ecosystems, not just one. Microsoft customers asking it. SAP customers asking it. Partners asking it of vendors. Vendors finally answering it directly. The conversation didn't get less ambitious, it got more honest. That's a healthier place than where the industry was a year ago, and it sets up the next cycle to actually move.
ERP horror stories: still telling them, still learning
One thing didn't change: the horror stories. They were everywhere again last year and we expect them this year. The go-live that slid eighteen months. The budget that doubled. The integrator switch in month seven.
The fact that the community keeps telling these stories openly, in mixed company of customers and partners and vendors, is one of the healthiest things about this ecosystem. Other software industries hide their failures and the failures keep happening. The Microsoft and SAP communities surface them, name them, and turn them into shared learning. Every horror story you hear is fifty future customers who'll avoid the same mistake.
The community is converging on a diagnosis, even if it doesn't always name it directly: the problem on big ERP programs is rarely the platform. It's the visibility into the program itself.
What customers and partners agree on now
Sit in enough of these conversations and the same four ideas keep showing up across both ecosystems. None of them are new — but they're being said with more conviction now than they were a year ago, and they're starting to operationalize.
Implementation data should be an asset, not a byproduct. Most projects throw away the most valuable thing they produce — the record of what actually happened, week by week — because the tools used to run them weren't built to keep it. Customers are getting more sophisticated about asking where will this data live, and how will it survive consultant turnover? That's a question that wasn't getting asked this directly twelve months ago.
Repeatable playbooks beat heroic effort. The partners who deliver consistently are the ones who've built systems for capturing what works. The ones whose teams burn out are the ones who rebuild from scratch every project. Customers are starting to ask their integrators to show their playbooks during evaluation, not just talk about methodology in the abstract.
Risk should surface before it becomes a problem. Every horror story you hear at these events has a moment, weeks or months earlier, where the warning signs were there. The question is whether anyone could see them in time. The community is increasingly impatient with after-the-fact post-mortems and wants tools and practices that make risk visible while it's still cheap to address.
Sales, delivery, and leadership need to see the same picture. The biggest source of friction on big programs isn't anyone doing their job badly. It's three groups of people working from three different versions of reality. The conversation around governance is shifting from more meetings to better shared visibility and that shift is going to drive a lot of what gets discussed at next year's events.
These four ideas aren't a Microsoft thing or a SAP thing. They're the through-line of the whole conversation right now.
What we're watching for in the next cycle
A few things we'll be paying attention to as we head into the next round of community gatherings.
The shift from "should we use AI" to "how do we use it well." The first conversation is closing. The second one is opening. Expect more sessions on AI governance in delivery, more honest panels about what AI gets wrong on ERP programs, and more customers willing to share specific results, including specific failures.
Customers asking harder questions earlier. The trend toward more sophisticated buyer behavior is accelerating. Customers showing up to these events are arriving with sharper questions about scope, governance, and accountability than they were even a year ago. That puts pressure on partners and vendors to bring more substantive content. The era of generic “transformation journey” sessions is winding down.
Cross-ecosystem learning. Something we noticed this past year: more practitioners are showing up to events outside their primary platform. SAP customers attending Microsoft events to see how Dynamics customers are handling certain problems, and vice versa. The patterns and pains turn out to be more similar than different. We expect more of this next year, and it's a good sign.
The role of the customer's own program team. The most important question of the next cycle might be the one nobody's quite said directly yet: what should the customer's internal team actually be responsible for, and how do they staff to do it well? The integrator's job is the integrator's job. The platform vendor's job is theirs. But the customer's own program leadership is increasingly recognized as the third leg of the stool — and it's underserved by the current methodologies. Watch for this conversation to get louder.
Why this matters going into next year
If you're running an ERP program right now, or about to start one, the takeaway from this past year is straightforward: the romance is fading. The substance is rising. That's a good environment to learn in.
If you went to a community event this past year, you already know this. If you haven't been in a while, the next round is worth the trip. The conversations are sharper than they were two years ago and the people having them are more willing to be specific. That's not a small change.
For our part, we'll keep showing up. The Microsoft and SAP communities are one of the most underrated assets in the ERP world, and the past year confirmed it. The next year is going to be even more interesting.
If we saw you this past year, thanks for the conversations. If we missed you, we hope to catch you at the next one. Usually somewhere near the coffee.
