This week, Lemongrass said the two-dozen AI agents it offers on the SAP Discovery Center account for nearly a fifth of all partner-developed agents on the website, giving it a competitive advantage in bringing AI functionality to SAP enterprise applications.
Lemongrass, a leading cloud transformation and SAP Business AI services provider, sees AI agents as the future of helping businesses and organizations achieve a “clean core” SAP architecture and building AI operations within SAP environments.
This week Lemongrass said it has now developed and posted 24 AI agents on the SAP Discovery Center online catalog, accounting for nearly one-fifth of all partner AI agents published on the site.
“It’s really bridging the gap between IT and the business and focusing on the business process…to provide that agentic-first approach,” said Jonathan Brunt, strategic partner initiatives vice president at Lemongrass, speaking about the company’s agent portfolio in an interview with CRN.
[Related: SAP Unveils New Central AI Hub, Application Agent Suite At Sapphire Event]
“I think everyone is getting hammered with AI these days and we’re really trying to take the bias out of the decision and make it impactful for the customer,” he said.
Lemongrass, headquartered in Edison, N.J., is an SAP Gold partner and holds a number of strategic authorizations and competencies within the vendor’s SAP PartnerEdge program, including a Sell, Service, and Build designation, and holds a service authorization within the Rise with SAP program.
SAP Discovery Center currently lists 287 AI agents that work with its Joule AI-powered copilot. The majority were developed by SAP, but many are developed by the company’s channel partners.
The Lemongrass agent portfolio includes agents that span such workflows as autonomous spend/procurement, finance/working capital, service email operations, and integration/architecture. Specific examples include Commercial Procurement Request Agent, Days Sales Outstanding and Overdue Receivables Insights Agent, Email Response Drafting Agent, and Working Capital Insights Agent.
Other SAP partners offering a significant number of agents on the website include All for One, Applexus Technologies, Infosys, SAT Infotech and Wipro.
The Lemongrass agents work across connected enterprise workflows and incorporate the experience, expertise and best practices Lemongrass has gained from customer engagements and the use cases developed from them. The goal is to provide the agents as repeatable deployments, although Brunt said they can be “tweaked” to meet specific customer requirements.
“At Lemongrass, we lead with best practices and that is aligning to SAP’s strategy,” Brunt said, noting his company’s extensive experience with upgrading SAP systems. “This is really where our SAP heritage is extremely relevant because we understand how to make the complex simple and how that can accelerate a lot of value for our customers.”
AI Agents Key To SAP’s Technology Direction
AI agents that supplement the functionality of SAP’s enterprise applications have become a critical component of SAP’s overall technology strategy—and so are important for solution providers and service companies that partner with the software giant.
In May, at its annual Sapphire conference, SAP launched the SAP Business AI Platform, a unified system that combines the SAP Business Technology Platform, SAP Business Data Cloud, the Joule agentic copilot, and SAP Business AI—the latter the company’s earlier AI offerings built into SAP applications—into a single environment.
The company described the SAP Business AI Platform as the foundation for building, contextualizing, deploying and governing AI agents. It also debuted the SAP Autonomous Suite, a series of the company’s own AI agents—for specific business functions that augment SAP business applications.
In addition to extending and customizing SAP application functionality, Brunt noted that AI agents can provide valuable insights by connecting data from multiple applications, such as a procurement system and a contract risk management application. Today, that’s often a time-consuming manual process.
While customers may turn to the SAP Discovery Center to find the AI agents, prospective customers still engage with the partners to buy and implement them. Brunt said Lemongrass provides services to “operationalize” the agents, including integrating them with data sources and providing governance capabilities.
A Role In SAP ECC Migrations
All this comes as SAP is encouraging customers to migrate to its cloud-based SAP S/4HANA application suite from legacy SAP Business Suite 7 core applications (known as ERP Central Component or ECC). Mainstream maintenance for those products is scheduled to end at the close of 2027 and it’s spurring a wave of system migration projects.
AI agents are key to SAP’s “clean core” strategy that encourages customers to implement and maintain an enterprise application architecture with standard business process functionality that’s free of the modifications and custom code that make upgrades complex and costly.
AI agents are promoted as the way to extend clean core functionality and add custom capabilities to enterprise applications. AI agents also perform best on a clean core with less custom code and simpler integration.
Lemongrass is a long-time systems migration service provider in this space with its Lemongrass Cloud Platform AI solution that automates, analyzes and optimizes SAP workloads.
“It investigates and ingests all of a customer’s customizations, and that allows us to lean in with a more aggressive AI strategy where we can not only remediate some of those inefficiencies but facilitate some of these agents to support their competitive edge and advantage as well,” Brunt said of the Lemongrass platform.
“We view this as a great opportunity,” Brunt said, offering AI agents to go beyond system modernization to “scale innovation” for customers and boost the ROI generated by enterprise applications.
“When most are still focusing on the larger complex transformation, we are taking more of an agentic approach to find some of the gaps, accelerate the time to value, and provide AI in operation today,” he said.
All these developments in the SAP universe are expected to be hot topics at the upcoming SAP TechEd Virtual event Oct. 27-29.
