thomas.wieberneit@aheadcrm.co.nz
SAP Draws a Perimeter around Agentic AI and What That Means for the Rest of US

SAP Draws a Perimeter around Agentic AI and What That Means for the Rest of US

by | Apr 29, 2026 | Analysis, Blog |

The most consequential enterprise AI governance document published this year arrived in late April with surprisingly little fanfare. SAP’s updated API Policy, version 4/2026, is a short document in plain English. The clause that is most interesting is Section 2.2.2. It restricts how autonomous and generative AI systems are permitted to interact with SAP APIs. Read literally, it has the potential to change the architecture of agentic AI projects across every SAP customer landscape. Read carefully, it is also more interesting than the lock-in headlines suggest. The policy targets a specific category of AI behavior, not AI as such. It connects to commercial mechanics that go well beyond API stability. And the literal text, in its current form, will probably not survive the next two policy revisions intact. There is a lot to unpack. I will walk through what the policy actually says, how the SAP-watching community is reading it, what the rest of the major enterprise vendors are doing in comparison, what counts as an “endorsed architecture”, and what customers and partners should be doing about it now. I’ll close with a view on whether the policy can stand the test of time. What Section 2.2.2 actually says The operative sentence is direct. “Except through and within the limits of SAP-endorsed architectures, data services, or service-specific pathways expressly identified and intended for such purposes, SAP prohibits API use for interaction or integration with semi-autonomous or generative AI systems that plan, select, or execute sequences of API calls”. The same paragraph also prohibits scraping, harvesting, or systematic large-scale data extraction. Three things flow from that. First, only Published APIs,...
SAP Strategy – Decyphered

SAP Strategy – Decyphered

by | Apr 27, 2018 | Analysis, Blog |

Much has happened in the SAP world in the past few months that were covered by the requisite number of announcements – and a good deal of analysis, including mine. SAP has Released its first release of S/4HANA for Customer Management Acquired CallidusCloud, a software company that focuses on sales enablement Announced a new ERP licensing model ‚for the Digital Age‘ While these three topics seem to be very different, combined they give a good insight into SAP’s strategy, and how the ERP world – sorry, the S/4 world, and the customer facing world are going to shape up. So, let’s have a brief look at these three announcements separately, and then connect a few dots. S/4HANA for Customer Management I have covered the migration of SAP CRM into S/4HANA a couple of times. S/4HANA for Customer Management  is the ‘customer orientated’ part of S/4HANA and shall offer the core service- and sales functionalities of SAP CRM, using a unified data model. It  is supposed to focus on what SAP calls the ‘heavy lifting customer processes’ and to support comprehensive core processes, thereby providing one central customer database. In other words this means that S/4HANA for Customer Management as part of S/4HANA will have a strong focus on (business) transaction processing and enabling the logistics that comes with fulfilment. One could say that it becomes a transaction engine. Keep that thought in mind. CallidusCloud Acquisition CallidusCloud provides leading solutions for sales performance management, CPQ, Contract Lifecycle Management, and more. This portfolio nicely plugs a few holes in the SAP Hybris portfolio and offers SAP options or at least another...