Every CIO dreads the next SAP upgrade. If agentic AI does what its backers claim, they may have just signed off on their last one.
That is the case Rimini Street is now making.
"Agentic AI has broken the nexus between having to do an upgrade path to get functionality," says Joe Locandro, the company's global chief information officer. Build the new functionality in a layer of agents above the ERP, his argument runs, and the system underneath never needs the expensive upgrade again.
It is a notable turn for the company. Rimini Street has spent two decades selling third-party support for SAP, Oracle and other enterprise systems, undercutting the maintenance fees the vendors charge for the same software.
Its business was keeping older systems running cheaply. Now it has rebranded itself as an AI agent vendor and consultancy that builds workflows on top of the same ERP systems. The pitch has flipped from "we will support your ERP for less" to "stop pouring money into your ERP at all".
The ERP turned inside out
The logic inverts how enterprise software has worked. The ERP has been the centre of the business, with everything built inside it. Locandro's model turns that around. Workflows move into a layer of agents that sit above the ERP and reach into it for data and actions.
"Innovation is now happening outside the core, rather than from within the core," he says. Over time, he argues, "the ERP shrinks and the functionality in the workflows get created outside", until it "becomes a system of record, or a database".
The agents become where the work lives. The ERP becomes the host they draw on.
The reason a CIO might listen is cost. On-premise ERP upgrades carry risk, can be enormously expensive and drag on for months or even years.
SAP customers typically pay around a fifth of their licence cost every year just for vendor support. Rimini's argument is that the money saved by not upgrading pays for the agents instead.
What the agent does
Organisations can create custom agents for their central workflows that automate a series of tasks within an ERP and other systems. The agents understand context and reasons across systems, validate data and policies and behave like a digital employee, Locandro says.
The clearest example is inventory. A manager who once worked across three or four systems to reconcile forecasts, stock and incoming supply can instead use an agent to generate a ranked list of recommended purchase orders. "That used to take about 12 clicks and about 15 to 20 minutes per operation," Locandro says. "We were able to reduce that to three clicks and in a matter of three minutes." The build took about eight weeks in Rimini's custom user interface, which in this case was powered by ServiceNow. Locandro says that the Rimini interface is agnostic and works with other providers such as Palantir, Microsoft Copilot and Meta. Rimini has about 29 customer deployments in beta, says Locandro.
Where it breaks
Setting up agents for the first time requires a certain amount of groundwork. The first is ensuring that the data you're using in the workflow is in good shape – not just for the pilot but also ongoing.
In a previous role at another company experimenting with agents, a pilot that looked strong on a sample dataset collapsed once it went into production. "When we loaded the full data, our accuracy dropped from 90 odd percent to 67 percent," Locandro says. Recovering it took three or four months of data cleansing.
The other trap is process knowledge. Teams assume they understand a workflow end to end until they try to automate it. "Then you find there are all these exceptions that weren't documented," Locandro says. This is an opportunity to re-engineer and improve the process, but it adds time.
Two questions hang over the bet. The first is whether the accuracy holds as deployments multiply beyond the structured ERP data the agents handle well today. The second is accountability. An agent acting inside a customer's ERP touches the systems the business runs on, and when something breaks it is not always clear who carries it.
If mistakes occur in a workflow, the agents can show full audit trails to identify whether they were at fault or if the error occurred upstream.
For a CIO being told to stop upgrading the system of record, that is the question to settle first.
Joe Locandro is global chief information officer of Rimini Street. The full interview is available on the Scale100 YouTube channel.
