{"id":53540,"date":"2026-06-16T15:43:54","date_gmt":"2026-06-16T14:43:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/?p=53540"},"modified":"2026-06-16T15:43:55","modified_gmt":"2026-06-16T14:43:55","slug":"how-enterprises-can-leverage-ai-agents-in-sap-while-minimising-risk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/2026\/06\/16\/how-enterprises-can-leverage-ai-agents-in-sap-while-minimising-risk\/","title":{"rendered":"How enterprises can leverage AI agents in SAP while minimising risk"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Eamonn O\u2019Neill, co-founder and CTO, Lemongrass, says organisations looking to deploy AI within SAP environments can balance innovation and governance by combining custom AI agents with robust controls – avoiding unnecessary risk while preparing for future upgrades.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the surface, enterprise SAP customers seeking to take advantage of AI may seem to face a major conundrum. On the one hand, SAP is in the process of rolling out a variety of powerful AI agentics and other capabilities. Integrating these solutions is a simple, low-risk way to take advantage of AI in SAP.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the other hand, SAP\u2019s native AI functionality is only fully available to businesses that are using the latest versions of its software. Upgrading is a time-consuming and risk-prone process that is just not realistic in the short term for many organisations. Thus, the question is: How can enterprises leverage AI within SAP environments using the capabilities currently available to them without adding unnecessary risk?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is a clear answer. Unpacking it, as I will do in this article, requires nuanced perspective on the state of AI within the SAP ecosystem as well as the pros and cons of using or not using SAP\u2019s native technology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The SAP AI caveat<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

SAP has been at the forefront of building enterprise-ready AI solutions to help businesses scale and accelerate processes across a variety of domains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But there is a big caveat, as I mentioned above: To use SAP\u2019s native AI tools, enterprises need to be running the latest versions of its software. Most are not, which is understandable given that SAP is a complex platform that many organisations have been using for decades, making it challenging to bring all SAP environments fully up to speed with the latest vendor offerings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That said, organisations that are not prepared to upgrade can still take advantage of AI within SAP environments in other ways. Instead of integrating SAP\u2019s native AI capabilities, they can build their own agents, then deploy them within SAP as add-ons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The risk and reward of SAP AI deployments<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The latter approach, however, comes with its own caveats. The biggest is that adding third-party AI agents to SAP environments may introduce technical debt and governance risks that would be easier to avoid when using native SAP capabilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, at the heart of SAP\u2019s overarching strategy in recent years is the Clean Core initiative, whose goal is to avoid entangling custom code with the core SAP platform. Businesses that operate third-party agents within SAP do exactly the opposite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the long term, this has the potential to lead to situations where upgrading SAP becomes even harder than it was before introducing AI agents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is also a risk that native SAP governance, compliance, security and privacy controls will not work flawlessly with third-party agents due to disconnects between the way agents are designed and the way SAP expects software to run.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Enterprises may therefore appear to be facing a very tough decision: Do they add custom AI agents to SAP and accept the increased risk? Or do they forego the benefits of AI within their ERP system as a way of mitigating risk and technical debt?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Squaring the circle: Leveraging AI in SAP while minimising risk<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fortunately, this is actually a false choice. It is possible to take full advantage of custom AI agents within SAP without letting risk and technical debt spin out of control.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The solution is to leverage what I call AI \u2018harnesses\u2019, meaning guardrails and other tooling that enforce governance restrictions over AI agents within SAP. In most cases, building harnesses means combining native SAP guardrails with third-party controls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For instance, an organisation could use policies within SAP BTP (now SAP Business AI Platform) to restrict which data agents can access. Simultaneously, they could use a hyperscaler identity management framework such as Microsoft Entra to register and authenticate agents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The result is a solution that effectively mitigates governance risks without investing heavily in tooling that creates technical debt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the long term, the best path to agentifying SAP processes is to upgrade SAP and integrate the vendor\u2019s native AI capabilities. But until that goal becomes more feasible for the typical organisation, businesses should opt for the next-best approach, which is to couple custom agents with the SAP BTP platform to reduce risk while still providing access to modern AI capabilities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eamonn O\u2019Neill, co-founder and CTO, Lemongrass, says organisations looking to deploy AI within SAP environments can balance innovation and governance by combining custom AI agents with robust controls – avoiding unnecessary risk while preparing for future upgrades. On the surface, enterprise SAP customers seeking to take advantage of AI may seem to face a major […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":58,"featured_media":53541,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6936,7925,26,43],"tags":[7762,9255,8841,8734,8700,221,596,5498,1703,5458,12106,1774,12108,12107,11231],"class_list":["post-53540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ai","category-expert-opinion","category-industry-expert","category-top-stories","tag-ai-agents","tag-ai-compliance","tag-ai-governance","tag-ai-risk-management","tag-ai-security","tag-digital-transformation","tag-enterprise-ai","tag-enterprise-software","tag-erp","tag-lemongrass","tag-microsoft-entra","tag-sap","tag-sap-btp","tag-sap-business-ai-platform","tag-technical-debt"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/58"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53540"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53540\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53544,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53540\/revisions\/53544"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/53541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}