Lemongrass CTO: SAP Customers Want AI Now, Not Later

Lemongrass CTO Eamonn O’Neill says SAP partners face a changing customer mandate: deliver AI value now, govern emerging agentic tools, and use automation to make transformation work faster, cheaper, and more scalable.

SAP customers want AI before the transformation cycle ends

SAP customers are no longer willing to wait years for AI value to arrive at the end of a modernization journey, according to O’Neill.

In an interview with Channel Insider ahead of SAP Sapphire, O’Neill said customers are increasingly looking for partners to help them introduce AI into existing SAP environments while still advancing toward broader modernization goals.

“Customers are fed up with that message… do your normal sequential journey, and at the end of that, activate AI,” O’Neill said. “This is not about waiting till 2027. This is today and possible.”

Why Lemongrass is providing customers a ‘bridge’ between legacy and modern SAP environments

For Lemongrass, that means positioning SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) as a bridge between legacy SAP estates and newer AI-enabled capabilities. 

O’Neill said even customers still running ECC can begin applying AI to business processes through BTP, rather than waiting for a full S/4HANA transformation to finish.

“I think the secret here is BTP,” he said. “If you keep BTP part of the mix, then SAP wins either way. And the customer wins.”

“We’re showing customers how to do it. And the interesting thing is, it’s not that difficult. It’s actually a lot easier than some people might fear,” O’Neill added.

AI governance becomes a channel opportunity

O’Neill said the conversation is also shifting from AI experimentation to governance, particularly as enterprises begin using AI agents across business processes.

He described “harnesses” as an emerging priority: systems that give enterprises visibility and control over which agents are deployed, what access they have, what data they consume, and what they cost to run.

“Everybody can write an agent today. Well, what are they all doing? What access have they got? How much did it cost them to run?” O’Neill said. “You wouldn’t just give a person read access to all your systems and say, ‘Go and create some POs for me.’”

That governance challenge could become a significant opportunity for SAP-focused partners and managed services providers. 

O’Neill said one customer recently joked about conducting “performance reviews on agents,” an idea he believes is closer to reality than it sounds.

“That’s exactly what business leaders need to be doing,” he said.

Partners face pressure to automate their own delivery

O’Neill said customers are not only asking how AI can improve their SAP environments; they are also asking how partners are using AI to lower the cost and timeline of transformation work.

“They don’t want four-year programs anymore. They want nine-month programs,” he said. “They don’t want to spend hundreds of millions of dollars. That’s going to be tens of millions.”

Lemongrass has embedded AI into areas such as clean core analysis, code evaluation, and recommendations, which O’Neill said has reduced manual effort while improving quality.

That has helped Lemngrass grow significantly without the pressure of large amounts of additional headcount.

“We don’t want to build a 10,000-man organization. We want to scale through technology,” he said.

He added that partners may soon be expected to offer catalogs of AI agents that customers can consume directly or use to accelerate partner-delivered services.

“We’ve had customers [tell us] they only engage SIs who can provide at least some of their services via AI agents,” O’Neill said. 

Automation does not eliminate partner demand

While AI automation may reduce some traditional managed services tasks, O’Neill argued it will expand opportunities for partners that lean into the shift.

“Technology expands economies. Technology expands opportunity — but only to people that use it,” he said.

For MSPs and SAP partners concerned about displacement, O’Neill said the differentiator will be the ability to define business intent, guide change, and apply new tools to customer problems.

“The job is to try and help customers deal with this. Take it on, understand it… and try to make it much more obvious what this is all about.”

He expects “a big chunk” of managed services work to become fully automated, but said that does not worry him.

“Not at all,” O’Neill said. “Because it means we can do more. We can do more customers, but also, we can get those same people to do other work and new things.”