Digital Transformation Statistics (2026): Spend, Success Rates, S/4HANA and AI

Technology budgets are growing faster in 2026 than at any time this decade. The success rate of the projects those budgets pay for has barely moved. This page collects the most recent sourced numbers on digital transformation spending, outcomes, SAP migration progress, ERP cost and schedule performance, quality engineering and AI. It is written for the people who have to sign off on the release.

Key takeaways

Spending: how much is going into transformation in 2026

Gartner raised its 2026 worldwide IT spending forecast in each of its first three updates this year. AI infrastructure drove most of the increase. For ERP programs this matters in two ways. You are competing with AI projects for budget. And spending on IT services, the category that includes application implementation, is the largest of all.

• In February 2026, Gartner forecast $6.15 trillion in worldwide IT spending for 2026, up 10.8% from 2025 (Gartner, February 2026).
• In April 2026, Gartner raised the forecast to $6.31 trillion, up 13.5%. It expected data center systems to grow fastest, at 55.8%, and IT services (including application implementation and managed services) to be the largest category, at more than $1.87 trillion (Gartner, April 2026).
• In July 2026, Gartner raised the forecast again, to $6.37 trillion, up 14.2% (Gartner via I-Connect007, July 2026).
• In February, Gartner expected 2026 software spending to grow 14.7%, down slightly from its earlier 15.2% estimate (Gartner, February 2026).
• In its 2026 Digital Transformation Spending Guide, IDC expects software's share of digital transformation spending to rise from 32% in 2026 to 36% by 2029. That is a 21.7% compound annual growth rate (CAGR), against 19.8% for hardware and 10.6% for services (IDC, 2026).

Source: Gartner's 2026 worldwide IT spending forecast (US$ trillions) at each update: Gartner, Feb 2026; Gartner, Apr 2026; Gartner via I-Connect007, Jul 2026

Gartner's February forecast broke 2026 spending down by segment. Later updates moved the totals, but IT services stayed the largest category.

Source: Gartner, February 2026 (Table 1 converted from US$ millions; bar length relative to IT services)

Success rates: how many transformations deliver

The most-quoted transformation success rates come from studies that are now several years old. Gartner's 2026 CIO survey is the newest large data point. Its definition differs from BCG's: Gartner counts individual digital initiatives that meet or exceed business targets, while BCG counted whole transformation programs. The BCG and Gartner numbers in the chart below are not a time series.

• In the 2026 Gartner CIO and Technology Executive Survey, 48% of digital initiatives met or exceeded their business targets. In the same survey, 94% of CIOs expected major changes to their plans and outcomes within 24 months (Gartner, 2026 CIO Agenda). The survey drew responses from more than 2,500 CIOs and technology executives (The National CIO Review, October 2025).
• In that survey, 57% of CIOs reported pressure to improve productivity and 52% pressure to cut costs. Only 33% consistently pursue financial outcomes from their technology initiatives (Gartner, 2026 CIO Agenda).
• Historical: In BCG's 2020 study of digital transformations, 30% met or exceeded their target value and produced lasting change. Another 44% created some value but missed their targets, and 26% delivered less than half of their target value (BCG, 2020).
• Historical: BCG's 2021 research covered more than 850 companies. It found 35% achieved their digital transformation objectives. Successful transformers reported an average 21% EBIT increase in the businesses in scope, against 10% for unsuccessful ones (BCG, 2021).
• Historical: McKinsey found that large companies had captured on average only 31% of the revenue lift and 25% of the cost savings they expected from digital and AI transformations (McKinsey, 2023).

Source: BCG, 2020; BCG, 2021; Gartner, 2026 CIO Agenda (definitions differ; scale 0–100%)

Where SAP customers are on the S/4HANA journey

User-group surveys on both sides of the Atlantic show S/4HANA has become the majority platform among their members. They also show a sizable group still planning to run ECC well past 2027. SAP's own figures, which are vendor data, show cloud ERP commitments still growing faster than total revenue.

Source: ASUG, "Navigating SAP S/4HANA" (194 members), via diginomica, October 2026

• ASUG polled 194 members for its 2026 S/4HANA report. 68% were live on S/4HANA or in the process of moving from ECC, and 62% had been on S/4HANA for less than three years (ASUG via diginomica, October 2026).
• In ASUG's 2025 Pulse of the SAP Customer research, 47% of members called the move to S/4HANA a vital undertaking. 44% named integration between SAP and non-SAP systems as a focus, up from 36% in 2024 (ASUG, March 2025).
• In the same 2025 research, 36% of members prioritized standardizing business processes and 35% prioritized adding automation to their IT stacks (ASUG, March 2025).
• In the German-speaking SAP user group's 2026 investment report, 56% of respondents use S/4HANA on-premises, up from 44% in 2024. That puts it ahead of ECC and the older Business Suite (54%, down from 68%) for the first time (DSAG via all-about-security.de, 2026).
• Among DSAG companies still on ECC, about half plan to switch to S/4HANA by the end of 2030 and accept extended maintenance surcharges. 37% aim to switch by the end of 2027 and 4% by 2033 (DSAG via all-about-security.de, 2026).

DSAG respondents also said where their high and medium 2026 SAP budgets would go. On-premises S/4HANA leads, and public cloud trails far behind.

Source: DSAG Investment Report 2026, February 2026 (share of respondents planning high or medium investment; scale 0–100%)

SAP vendor data. SAP's current cloud backlog (contracted cloud revenue expected over the next 12 months) has grown every half-year since mid-2025.

Source: SAP current cloud backlog, € billions: SAP Quarterly Statement Q2 2026, July 2026 (Q2 2025 and Q2 2026); SAP Quarterly Statement Q4 2025, January 2026

• SAP's Q2 2026 current cloud backlog was €22.9 billion, up 27% (26% at constant currencies). Cloud ERP Suite revenue grew 25% (27% at constant currencies) (SAP, July 2026).
• SAP's total cloud backlog reached a record €77 billion at the end of 2025. SAP said Business AI was part of two-thirds of its Q4 2025 cloud order entry (SAP News Center, January 2026).

Cost, budget and timeline performance

Two recent surveys measure ERP cost performance, and they disagree. ASUG surveyed SAP customers moving to S/4HANA. Panorama surveyed ERP projects across vendors, at organizations with a median annual revenue of $200.5 million. In Panorama's data, about half of projects finished on budget. Among ASUG members, about a third said costs matched expectations. Panorama's median timeline is also much shorter than ASUG's average time to go-live. The populations and scopes are different, so expect SAP-scale numbers to sit closer to ASUG's.

• 61% of S/4HANA go-lives in ASUG's 2026 research ran on time, up from 56% in 2025. The average go-live took about 1.4 years, and ROI arrived in just under seven months (ASUG via diginomica, October 2026).
• 42% of S/4HANA newcomers said costs matched expectations, against 35% of all respondents. Only 3% said their project came in under budget (ASUG via diginomica, October 2026).
• Budget constraints are now the top challenge for SAP customers, cited by 61% of respondents to ASUG's 2026 Pulse of the SAP Customer survey. That is 7 percentage points higher than in 2025 (CIO.com, May 2026).
• Panorama's 2026 ERP Report surveyed 170 respondents between January 2025 and January 2026 and found a median project timeline of nine months (Panorama Consulting Group, 2026).
• More than a quarter of organizations in Panorama's survey went over budget. Additional technology needs were the leading cause (Panorama Consulting Group, March 2026).
• 58.8% of Panorama projects finished on time and 18.8% finished early (Panorama 2026 data summarized by XoroSoft, 2026).

Source: Panorama Consulting Group 2026 ERP Report, summarized by XoroSoft, 2026 (scale 0–100%)

Among Panorama respondents who went over budget, the reasons below were the most common. Several of them, including scope growth, technical problems and data issues, are things a test lead can usually see coming.

Source: Panorama Consulting Group 2026 ERP Report, summarized by XoroSoft, 2026 (multiple responses allowed; scale 0–100%)

What gets deployed alongside the ERP

• Business intelligence was the digital initiative most often deployed significantly alongside ERP, by 55.3% of organizations in Panorama's 2026 survey (Panorama Consulting Group, March 2026).
• Significant deployment of web commerce fell from 59.9% in the 2025 report to 39.4% in the 2026 report (Panorama Consulting Group, 2026).
• 56.5% of organizations in Panorama's 2026 sample were multinationals (Panorama Consulting Group, 2026).

Testing and quality engineering

Capgemini's World Quality Report is the largest annual survey of quality engineering leaders. The 2025–26 edition shows generative AI in testing moving from pilots toward production. It also shows test data and integration as the main barriers, and both are familiar problems on SAP programs.

• 89% of organizations are piloting or deploying generative AI in quality engineering workflows: 37% in production and 52% in pilots (Capgemini, November 2025).
• Only 15% have scaled generative AI in quality engineering enterprise-wide (Capgemini, World Quality Report 2025–26).
• The top barriers to scaling it are data privacy risks (67%), integration complexity (64%) and skill gaps (50%) (Capgemini, November 2025).
• 60% of organizations struggle to get secure, scalable test data, and 58% report challenges adopting AI-powered test tools (Capgemini, World Quality Report 2025–26).
• Use of synthetic data in testing rose from 14% in 2024 to an average of 25% in 2025 (Capgemini, World Quality Report 2025–26).
• Respondents ranked generative AI as the top skill for quality engineers (63%), just ahead of core quality engineering skills (60%) (Capgemini, World Quality Report 2025–26).

The share of organizations not using generative AI in quality engineering at all fell sharply after 2023, then rose again in 2025 as teams reassessed readiness and value.

Source: Capgemini World Quality Report, November 2025 (generative AI non-adopters in quality engineering)

AI in delivery: adoption is high, trust is not

Developer surveys agree that AI tools are now standard in software delivery. They also show that trust in AI output is falling. For anyone signing off a release, that makes reviewing AI-generated code and test assets a control you need, not a nice-to-have. The adoption figures below differ because the surveys measure different things. DORA asked technology professionals whether they use AI at work. Stack Overflow asked developers about use in their development process, and its 84% figure includes people who only plan to use AI tools.

• 90% of the nearly 5,000 technology professionals in DORA's 2025 research use AI at work, and more than 80% say it has increased their productivity (DORA, 2025).
• 65% of DORA respondents rely heavily on AI for software development (Google Cloud via BigDATAwire, September 2025).
• 84% of the more than 49,000 respondents to Stack Overflow's 2025 survey use or plan to use AI tools in development, up from 76% in 2024. 51% of professional developers use them daily (Stack Overflow, 2025).
• 46% of Stack Overflow respondents distrust the accuracy of AI tools and 33% trust it. Only 3% report high trust (Stack Overflow, 2025).
• The biggest frustration, cited by 66% of developers, is AI output that is almost right but not quite. Next is that debugging AI-generated code takes longer (45%) (Stack Overflow, 2025).
• Positive sentiment toward AI tools fell from more than 70% in 2023 and 2024 to 60% in 2025 (Stack Overflow, 2025).
• 31% of 2025 respondents were using AI agents. A smaller Stack Overflow pulse survey in April 2026 put agent use at 59% (Stack Overflow, September 2026).

Source: Stack Overflow, September 2026 (developers using AI tools, excluding those only planning to)

AI value, risk and governance

Enterprise AI plans are now moving faster than the controls around them. Gartner's two surveys of CIOs about a year apart point the same way: agentic AI deployment plans are getting more aggressive. The populations differ, so read the change as a direction, not an exact rate.

Source: Gartner, October 2026 (Q2 2026 survey of 2,000+ CIOs and technology executives; Q3 2026 survey of 303 CIOs and IT risk leaders)

• 58% of leaders see some positive value from their AI initiatives, according to a Q2 2026 Gartner survey of more than 1,000 functional leaders (Gartner, October 2026).
• In October 2025, 64% of CIOs planned to deploy agentic AI within 24 months. Gartner also said AI spending was rising more than 35% year over year (The National CIO Review, reporting Gartner, October 2025).
• Separate ASUG research on AI adoption, run in February 2026 with Microsoft and Intel, found only 10% of SAP customers had achieved an enterprise-scale AI rollout (CIO.com, May 2026).

What this means for your sign-off

• Treat a "successful" transformation as roughly a coin flip until proven otherwise. Only 48% of digital initiatives meet their targets (Gartner). Exit criteria should tie test evidence to the business outcomes in the case for change, not only to defect counts.
• Plan for the ECC tail, not just the deadline. About half of DSAG's remaining ECC users plan to migrate by the end of 2030, and 4% are aiming for 2033. Regression assets will need to cover both systems for longer than most plans assume. Map your scope to the real deadlines in ECC end of maintenance: what 2027, 2030 and 2035 really mean.
• Budget pressure falls on testing first, so make the test budget defensible. 61% of ASUG respondents name budget as their top challenge, and only 3% of S/4HANA projects came in under budget. Use the SAP Test Automation ROI Calculator and the Go/No-Go Readiness Checklist in our template library to show what each test cycle protects.
• Fix test data before you add AI. 60% of organizations struggle with secure, scalable test data (Capgemini), and data issues contributed to 29.4% of Panorama's budget overruns. Test data for S/4HANA: copies, masking and synthetic data covers the options.
• Require human review of AI-generated tests and code. Only 33% of developers trust AI output and only 21% of organizations have agentic AI governance. Add a review gate and an approvals log to your test strategy before AI-generated test cases count as sign-off evidence.
• Automate the regression core first. Cloud ERP is growing at around 25% a year in SAP's own numbers, so more customers will be on regular upgrade cycles. S/4HANA regression automation: what to automate first sets out an order of attack.

Frequently asked questions

What percentage of digital transformations succeed?

In Gartner's 2026 CIO and Technology Executive Survey of more than 2,500 CIOs and tech executives, 48% of digital initiatives met or exceeded business targets (Gartner). Older BCG research, which counted whole programs, put the success rate at 30% in 2020 and 35% in 2021 (BCG, 2021).

How much will the world spend on IT in 2026?

Gartner's July 2026 forecast puts 2026 worldwide IT spending at $6.37 trillion, up 14.2% from 2025. That is up from its forecasts of $6.15 trillion in February and $6.31 trillion in April (Gartner via I-Connect007).

How many SAP customers have moved to S/4HANA?

68% of 194 ASUG members surveyed in 2026 were live on S/4HANA or in the process of moving (ASUG via diginomica). Among DSAG respondents, 56% use S/4HANA on-premises, compared with 54% still using ECC or the Business Suite (DSAG via all-about-security.de).

How long does an S/4HANA or ERP implementation take?

ASUG members report an average of about 1.4 years to S/4HANA go-live (ASUG via diginomica). Panorama's cross-vendor 2026 ERP Report, with 170 respondents, found a median timeline of nine months (Panorama).

How often do ERP projects go over budget?

In Panorama's 2026 data, 30% of ERP projects exceeded budget: 22.9% slightly and 7.1% significantly (Panorama via XoroSoft). Among S/4HANA programs, only 35% of ASUG respondents said costs matched expectations (ASUG via diginomica).

How widely is AI used in software testing?

89% of organizations in Capgemini's World Quality Report 2025–26 are piloting or deploying generative AI in quality engineering, but only 15% have scaled it enterprise-wide (Capgemini).

Sources

1. Gartner Forecasts Worldwide IT Spending to Grow 10.8% in 2026, Totaling $6.15 Trillion, Gartner, February 3, 2026
2. Gartner Forecasts Worldwide IT Spending to Grow 13.5% in 2026, Totaling $6.31 Trillion, Gartner, April 22, 2026
3. Gartner Forecasts Worldwide IT Spending to Grow 14.2% in 2026, Totaling $6.37 Trillion, Gartner via I-Connect007, July 2026
4. The CIO Agenda 2026, Gartner, 2026
5. LIVE From Gartner: A Glimpse Into the 2026 CIO Agenda, The National CIO Review, October 2025
6. Gartner Says AI Risk is Rising Faster Than AI Value, Gartner, October 19, 2026
7. DX Software in Transition: AI Investment Trends by Sector, IDC, 2026
8. Flipping the Odds of Digital Transformation Success, BCG, 2020 (historical)
9. Performance and Innovation Are the Rewards of Digital Transformation, BCG, 2021 (historical)
10. Rewired for value: Digital and AI transformations that work, McKinsey, 2023 (historical)
11. SAP Quarterly Statement Q2 2026 (Form 6-K, Exhibit 99.1), SAP SE, July 23, 2026
12. SAP Quarterly Statement Q4 2025 (Form 6-K, Exhibit 99.1), SAP SE, January 29, 2026
13. SAP Announces Q4 and FY 2025 Results, SAP News Center, January 29, 2026
14. ASUG Pulse of the SAP Customer Research: SAP Users Invest in Automation, Data Analytics, AI, ASUG, March 9, 2025
15. How are ERP customers faring with AI readiness? ASUG research reveals that S/4HANA migrations are accelerating, diginomica (by ASUG), October 6, 2026
16. SAP customers say migration is eating their budgets, and AI is next in line, CIO.com, May 2026
17. DSAG Investment Report 2026: Companies are investing more selectively, DSAG, February 2026
18. DSAG-Investitionsreport 2026: SAP bleibt gefragt, Budgets wachsen langsamer, all-about-security.de, 2026
19. Panorama Consulting Group Releases Latest Study of ERP Implementation Outcomes, Panorama Consulting Group, March 4, 2026
20. The 2026 ERP Report, Panorama Consulting Group, 2026
21. ERP Implementation Statistics 2026 (summary of Panorama data), XoroSoft, 2026
22. World Quality Report 2025: AI adoption surges in Quality Engineering, Capgemini, November 13, 2025
23. World Quality Report 2025–26, Capgemini, 2025
24. Balancing AI tensions, DORA (Google Cloud), 2026
25. Google Cloud's 2025 DORA Report Finds 90% of Developers Now Use AI in Daily Workflows, BigDATAwire, September 2025
26. 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, Stack Overflow, 2025
27. Getting ready for 2026 results: A look back on Developer Survey findings, Stack Overflow, September 30, 2026

Last updated: October 21, 2026. Statistics are refreshed as new research is published.