Mid-sized companies growing at pace have something large enterprises often lack: the ability to make decisions fast and change direction without eighteen months of committee work. According to a new SAP study, that agility gives fast-growth companies a genuine edge when it comes to AI adoption. They can prototype, test, and scale without the governance overhead that slows larger organisations. The problem is that most of them are not doing it.
We see the same pattern in our SAP mandates across the DACH region. The companies asking for AI-adjacent skills in their SAP hiring are almost always either very large or very small. The mid-market sits in the middle, often aware of the opportunity but stalled on execution. The stall is rarely about budget or technology readiness. It is about people.
Fast-growth companies typically run lean. Their SAP teams are already stretched across finance, supply chain, and whatever the last acquisition brought in. Adding an AI workload means either pulling someone off core operations or hiring. Hiring means competing for candidates who can bridge SAP process knowledge and data science fundamentals. Those candidates have options, and mid-market employers often lose them to larger companies with established AI teams or to startups offering equity and a greenfield mandate.
The companies that break through this pattern do one of two things. Some bring in a senior hire with explicit permission to build a small team from scratch, even if that team starts at two people. Others partner early with an implementation company and keep one internal hire focused solely on knowledge transfer, so the capability stays in-house once the partner leaves. Both approaches require the hiring manager to write a role that looks different from a standard SAP functional spec.
The agility advantage SAP describes is real. Whether a company captures it depends on whether they can staff for it, and right now most mid-market employers are writing the same job descriptions they wrote several years ago.
Prompted by reporting from SAP News Centre.