Experts question whether Salesforce demo breaches SAP API policy

SAP experts are questioning whether a recent Salesforce public demo of its AI technology would breach the German vendor’s controversial API policy - launched in April - in production environments.

Salesforce has denied it would break any of SAP’s access rules.

During the keynote presentation at the CRM vendor’s flagship Dreamforce conference in San Francisco last week, Katie O'Neil, Salesforce product marketing director, showed how a Salesforce AI agent was able to perform supplier onboarding with SAP, showcasing global engineering manufacturer Siemens as a customer.

The demo appears to show AI agent Marshall working in an SAP sandbox, learning “where to click, which fields are required,” O'Neil said.

The AI agent would use “LLM reasoning to really understand the business rules behind that process,” she said.

The outcome is that users working in Salesforce’s collaboration platform, Slack, can onboard customers in SAP, or so the demo purports to show.

“Marshall will package them up, create a library of trusted actions, and that is where AI reasoning becomes deterministic execution.

What does that mean? It means when it comes time for something like supplier onboarding, Marshall's not just improvising.

Marshall is executing against the same set of trusted actions every single time, so you know you can rely on him,” O’Neil said.

How ERP giant SAP — a company also betting its future on AI — feels about all this is another matter.

Being demoted to providing backend systems while Salesforce takes control of the user experience is not part of the German vendor's plans, we assume.

In a social media post, an independent SAP consultant argued that the demo, if replicated in the real world, would not be allowed by SAP under its API Policy.

Mario de Felipe, VP SAP data and AI at IT and managed services company Apiphani, said the API policy forbids "impersonation techniques." At the same time, any autonomous AI must go through SAP "endorsed architectures" to get inside SAP applications.

“Not only did they connect to the SAP API to update a supplier, which would have been simple, but not the wow-effect required for a keynote, they connected to an SAP system, captured SAP application logic… how the BP [business process] role model works... the complete SAP's product behavior,” he said.