For the German vendor, greater challenges may lie ahead, as rivals seek to control the user experience.
SAP experts are questioning whether a recent Salesforce public demo of its AI technology would breach the German vendor’s 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 outcome is that users working in Salesforce’s collaboration platform, Slack, can onboard customers in SAP, or so the demo purports to show.
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."
Marian Zeis, an independent SAP consultant in Germany, said he agreed with most of De Felipe’s interpretation.
Whether the Salesforce demo broke any of the API policy rules was a grey area, he said, while there were also ways to integrate these kinds of technology through “a permissible layer like SAP Integration Suite.”
When it launched its Joule Studio 2.0 at its Sapphire conference in May, SAP said it would allow developers to create and manage AI agents which connect and collaborate with third-party tools and third-party agents.