Experts question whether Salesforce demo breaches SAP API policy

SAP consultants are questioning whether the Salesforce AI demo shown at the Dreamforce conference would be allowed in production under SAP's API Policy, introduced in April. Salesforce denies the demonstration breaks any access rules.

What Salesforce showed at Dreamforce

During the keynote in San Francisco, Katie O'Neil, Salesforce product marketing director, showed a Salesforce AI agent carrying out supplier onboarding in SAP, with engineering manufacturer Siemens presented as the customer.

The agent, named Marshall, worked in an SAP test environment and learned "where to click, which fields are required," O'Neil said. Per the demo, users working in Slack can onboard suppliers in SAP: "Marshall is executing against the same set of trusted actions every single time, so you know you can rely on him."

The dispute over SAP's API Policy

Mario de Felipe, VP of SAP data and AI at Apiphani, argued in a LinkedIn post that the policy forbids "impersonation techniques" and requires autonomous AI to run through SAP-endorsed architectures, so the demo would not be allowed. It was not a new partnership between the vendors, he noted.

A Salesforce spokesperson told The Register the demonstration interacted with SAP through its user interface using service accounts, without using SAP APIs, so the cited restrictions do not apply. SAP declined to comment.

Published in April, the policy bans API use for integration with semi-autonomous or generative AI systems that plan, select or execute sequences of API calls unless that happens within SAP-endorsed architectures; scraping and large-scale data extraction fall under the same condition.

A grey area, consultants say

Marian Zeis, an independent SAP consultant in Germany, agreed with most of De Felipe's reading, but would not automatically call an agent acting with a user's authorization an impersonation technique. The bigger concern is practical, he said: the policy "does not fit very well with how customers actually work today."

John Appleby, a long-time SAP expert and former CEO of partner Avantra, cautioned that demos are designed to "be edgy but not break any license agreements," and that naming Siemens suggests compliance was checked. A permissible layer like SAP Integration Suite also exists for such integrations.

Why it matters

The dispute reflects a wider fight over who controls the user experience around ERP data. A senior analyst told The Register, anonymously, that the policy looks like protectionism, and that many large customers running generative AI through APIs may now be non-compliant. SAP wants agents built in its own environment: Joule Studio 2.0, shown in May, connects them to third-party tools.