The air in Davos is thin, but the insights from Data Migration International’s (DMI’s) Digital Lounge @ Davos this year were heavy. Away from the cameras of Davos Week, over 200 CXOs, IT leaders, and innovators from sectors including healthcare, manufacturing, logistics, energy, and the Swiss Army, gathered to discuss not just what AI can do, but what it costs to run it responsibly.
The consensus? The industry has officially exited the wow phase of AI and entered the how phase. This means that the path to 2027 isn’t about acquiring more intelligence; it’s about establishing control.
Here are the three structural shifts that defined Digital Lounge @ Davos this year—and what they mean for an organization’s SAP roadmap.
1. Technical Debt is Now Sovereignty Debt
For years, legacy data was treated as a technical overhead—a storage cost that had to be minimized during an SAP S/4HANA migration. However, that narrative has collapsed. Industry analysts are increasingly warning against shadow technical debt, which represents the hidden costs of maintaining outdated, non-standard configurations that eventually break under the weight of modern AI requirements.
During the event, leaders reframed technical debt as a direct threat to AI governance and digital sovereignty, emphasizing that without addressing historical data complexity, AI initiatives risk amplifying fragmentation rather than enabling trust and resilience.
Dr. Daniel Peter Fasnacht, CEO & Founder of EcosystemPartners, put it starkly on record when he said: “Control over data will determine Swiss innovativeness but also who sets the rules of global prosperity.”
This is a critical pivot for ERP professionals. If organizations cannot prove the lineage of the data feeding their AI agents, they don’t just have a dirty data problem; they have a sovereignty risk. This makes the new mandate clear: You cannot build sovereign AI on ungoverned, historical data.
2. From Capability to Accountability
If 2025 was about showing off what AI models could do, 2026 is about proving they can be trusted. The discussions at the Digital Lounge @ Davos didn’t treat AI as a standalone miracle but as a component of a larger risk landscape.
Bernardo Lindermann, Executive at BearingPoint, noted that the event addressed AI “very much embedded with other topics like cyber security, data security, data governance and robotics”.
This integration is the new standard. For SAP teams, this means innovation is no longer a valid excuse for bypassing governance protocols. The move fast and break things era is over and the move intentionally and secure things era has begun.
3. The Hackathon Reality Check
The event featured a 24-hour hybrid hackathon as well as enterprise sessions. However, the contrast between the two was telling. While the hackathon celebrated speed, the CIO roundtables celebrated discipline.
The hackathon featured dancing humanoid robots and robotic dogs that displayed speed and creativity. Eduardo Lazzarotto, CPO at Volue, praised the teams for tackling “amazing challenges from robotics and AI to energy transformation”.
On the other hand, the takeaway for SAP customers from the enterprise session was sharp: You can have hackathon-level innovation, but only if you have enterprise-grade foundations.
The event highlighted that clean core isn’t just an SAP best practice; it’s the only way to bridge the gap between a dancing robot and a reliable supply chain.
What This Means for ERP Insiders
Audit for accountability, not just accuracy. The event highlighted that organizations should not just ask if their data is correct, but ask if it is traceable. In the era of Agentic AI, the ability to audit an AI’s decision trail is more valuable than the decision itself.
Data retirement is a governance strategy. ERP Insiders should stop viewing data archiving as a storage tactic. It is a primary tool for reducing the attack surface of an organization’s AI. The less irrelevant data exposed to AI models, the lower its hallucination risk.
Sovereignty starts at the database. Organizations that operate in regulated industries, must note that their data strategy is also their legal strategy. They should ensure their SAP S/4HANA migration plan explicitly addresses data residency and sovereignty requirements before a single line of code is written.
