Our answer required more than a simple yes or no. The transactional layer of service delivery, the ticket routing, the basic troubleshooting, the routine configuration requests, is compressing fast. Companies in the DACH region have quietly reduced their L1 and L2 support headcounts by roughly a third over the past 18 months while maintaining the same service levels. The work is being absorbed by automation, and the remaining roles are shifting upstream.
Hiring managers now describe something different from two years ago. They want people who can design the automation. The SAP operations professional who thrives is the one who can define escalation logic, tune AI models for enterprise-specific edge cases, and explain to business stakeholders why a particular workflow should or should not be automated. Configuration knowledge has become the baseline; what earns attention is the ability to shape how automation behaves.
The squeeze is real for mid-career professionals who built expertise on repetitive, high-volume work. Companies are reducing those roles gradually, choosing to let attrition do the work rather than backfilling. The path forward is toward orchestration: understanding how automated services interact with human decision points, where the handoffs happen, and what breaks when they fail.
A logistics company in Vienna recently asked us to find someone who could own their entire automated service layer, from incident classification through resolution tracking. They wanted deep SAP knowledge combined with enough data engineering fluency to retrain their classification models quarterly. That search took four months because the profile crosses traditional boundaries between infrastructure and analytics. We eventually placed a candidate who had spent two years building similar automation at a Swiss retailer, someone who understood both the SAP architecture and the machine learning pipeline feeding it.
Prompted by reporting from SAP News Centre.