SAP Experts Question Salesforce Demo Over Breach of API Policy

Experts are questioning whether Salesforce's recent demo of its AI technology at the Dreamforce conference breached SAP's API policy. The demo, led by Katie O'Neil, product marketing director at Salesforce, showed how a Salesforce AI agent was able to perform supplier onboarding with SAP using an SAP sandbox.

The demonstration used LLM reasoning to understand business rules behind the process, and users in Slack could onboard customers in SAP. However, SAP experts argue that this demo would not be allowed under SAP's API Policy, which prohibits 'impersonation techniques' and requires autonomous AI systems to go through SAP-endorsed architectures.

Mario de Felipe, VP SAP data and AI at Apiphani, pointed out that the demo connected to an SAP system, captured application logic, and updated a supplier. He claimed that Salesforce knew what they showed during the keynote is not what customers should be doing, and that there are ways to do these things following SAP architecture.

Others see some rule-breaking in Salesforce's demo. Marian Zeis, an independent SAP consultant, agreed with most of de Felipe's interpretation, but noted that the API policy does not fit well with how customers work today.