SAP is pushing to shift to charging corporate customers based on artificial intelligence usage. Christian Klein (크리스티안 클라인), SAP's chief executive officer, laid out the plan in a recent interview with Bloomberg.

Klein said, "AI is so powerful and will automate numerous tasks, so there is no reason to stick with subscription-based billing."

The existing software-as-a-service model charged fees based on the number of users. With AI agents handling employees' work, per-user billing is losing its basis, he said. SAP will also set up a forward-deployed engineering team from July. The team will consist of consultants and developers with industry-specific expertise and will be dispatched to customer sites to build customised AI solutions on the SAP platform.

Klein said, "If a customer wants to improve delivery times, you need to talk directly with truck drivers to understand the current way of working and then design the solution."

SAP previously revamped its pricing strategy by adopting a modular structure and disclosing prices for its SaaS products. It also opened its platform using the Model Context Protocol (MCP) so external AI agents can communicate with SAP systems.

SAP's market capitalisation has fallen by about one-fifth this year. An analysis said the share-price drop was also influenced by investor concerns that the spread of AI could undermine the per-user billing model used by SaaS companies. SAP said it has already retrained 100,000 employees for the AI era, and that developers will shift their roles from writing code to building agents within the next few years.