WunderGraph CEO Jens Neuse has a bone to pick with the GraphQL Federation market. Apollo controls roughly 90% of it, he says, and there’s a good reason why: Most companies don’t want to rewrite their entire API infrastructure just to use Federation.“A lot of big enterprises are very eager to use Federation because it allows them to take a GraphQL schema and split it across multiple services,” Neuse told The New Stack during a recent interview. “But the main blocking point is not everybody wants to rewrite their whole architecture to be GraphQL services.”That’s the opening WunderGraph thinks it can exploit with Cosmo Connect, a new framework the company unveiled last week that lets organizations federate REST, SOAP, gRPC and other APIs without the typical GraphQL conversion headaches.The pitch is straightforward: Why rewrite your APIs when AI can do the heavy lifting instead?The Federation Problem Nobody Talks AboutGraphQL Federation sounds great in theory. You get unified data access, clear boundaries between services and a single API to rule them all. The catch? Traditional Federation assumes everything speaks GraphQL.“We don’t want to rewrite our REST APIs, our SOAP APIs, our legacy APIs and external services,” Neuse said. “We don’t want to rewrite it all into GraphQL services.”Moreover, current solutions are not exactly elegant. You can write GraphQL wrapper services, which is tedious. Or you can use Apollo’s connector approach, where you sprinkle directives on your schema to tell the router when to hit a REST endpoint instead of a GraphQL service.“The limitation of this approach is, if you cannot model it with these directives, you’re kind of stuck,” Neuse explained. “And also, these directives limit you to standard HTTP procedures. If you want to use an existing SDK of another provider or something, you cannot use all of that.”Enter the AI SolutionWunderGraph’s approach is different. Instead of forcing GraphQL on backend teams, they compile GraphQL schemas into gRPC protobuf definitions. The backend developers just implement a gRPC service — no GraphQL expertise required.Here’s where it gets interesting: The gRPC contracts are so simple and strictly typed that AI tools like Cursor or Claude can implement them automatically, Neuse said.“We take a subgraph schema and run it through a compiler that turns it into a gRPC protobuf definition,” he said. “Because we abstract away the complexity of GraphQL and put all of that into the router, you just implement your gRPC service.”The workflow becomes very simple. Define a schema, compile it to protobuf, then hand it to an AI. “You go to Cursor and say, ‘Here’s this protobuf and my OpenAPI spec — please implement it,'” Neuse said. “It’s integrating your APIs into the supergraph on autopilot.”The AI generates the plugin code that connects gRPC to existing REST APIs, complete with tests. No human developer is required for the integration work.“You can ask Cursor or Claude to connect whatever you want to the graph,” Neuse said. “All you need to do is define a schema, compile it into a proto and then ask an LLM to implement that.”Early Customers Are Buying InDespite Apollo’s market dominance, WunderGraph has landed some notable customers. Procore, one of the biggest proptech companies in the US, is using the approach. So are eBay, SoundCloud and others.“Many of these bigger, grown-up enterprises have lots of REST APIs but are stuck in that world,” Neuse said. “They are searching for ways to modernize the API infrastructure and expose their APIs and combine them into a cleaner GraphQL architecture.”Companies are increasingly using AI for development work, and the idea of having AI handle API integration grunt work has obvious appeal.“We already have a bunch of early adopters who are looking into this model,” Neuse said, noting that NerdWallet is also exploring the technology.Beyond GraphQLNeuse indicated that he is not content to just chip away at Apollo’s Federation business. He sees a much bigger opportunity in bringing Federation concepts to the broader API management market.“We’re looking into bringing the concept of Federation not just to GraphQL, but also to REST and other API standards,” he said. “That’s a much wider playing field.”That could put WunderGraph in competition with a much broader set of API management vendors, not just Apollo. But for now, the focus is on proving that AI can make GraphQL Federation accessible to companies that have been put off by the complexity.The question is whether enterprises will trust AI to handle their API integration work.WunderGraph Cosmo is open source and Cosmo Connect is available now.“There is no AI without APIs,” Neuse said. “Cosmo Connect gives companies a single unified platform across services and protocols, freeing developers to focus on building rather than integrating.”The post WunderGraph Uses AI To Challenge Apollo’s GraphQL Empire appeared first on The New Stack.