Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

The 2027 S/4HANA deadline still looms large in the minds of SAP customers, but at this year’s SAP Sapphire event, SAP worked to move the conversation beyond cloud migration alone. Instead, they introduced a broader redefinition of what it means to be an “Autonomous Enterprise.” At the center of this new Autonomous Enterprise strategy is agentic AI. SAP envisions the future enterprise as one that can leverage its business data to power agents across its ERP applications.

Not long ago, the answer to who writes tests was simple: the quality assurance (QA) engineer does. They sat downstream of development, received a build, and translated requirements into scripts. It was a defined role with a defined output. That clarity is gone. In 2026, the person or system responsible for test creation might be a business analyst (BA) mapping out a customer journey, an AI agent expanding test coverage overnight, or a QA engineer who hasn’t written a traditional script in months.

Quick summary: AI is creating anxiety and excitement — teams can get more work done faster, but does all this automation leave the worker behind? Not necessarily, says one performance engineering leader. The AI revolution, he says, is another technological wave. To ride it, performance engineers must embrace the change.

At some of the most sophisticated engineering organizations in the world, the best developers are already writing zero percent of code manually. AI agents are generating features, spinning up test suites, and moving software through delivery pipelines faster than most governance frameworks were designed to handle. The speed is real, and so is the exposure that comes with it.