A presentation given by Paul Dumas, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner, at our 2024 Austin API Summit, March 12-13. Session Description: GenAI will be, well, generating APIs. We are entering the era where software creates software. It will develop APIs faster than humans are capable of. Humans cannot compete with this compute power. How do we marshal this power, govern what it produces, and leverage it to support our business objectives and strategies? We will become more dependent on the capabilities we have as humans that elude machines. This talk provides insight to software leaders about the challenges of leading and managing this new software development power. The key lies in skills that are unique to humans: foresight, intuition, and agility.

1. © 2024 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. or its affiliates. This presentation, including all supporting materials,
is proprietary to Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is for the sole internal use of the intended recipients. Because this presentation may contain information that is confidential,
proprietary or otherwise legally protected, it may not be further copied, distributed or publicly displayed without the express written permission of Gartner, Inc. or its affiliates.
GenAI: Producing
and Consuming
APIs
Paul Dumas
Senior Director Analyst

2. 2 © 2023 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and its affiliates.
What You Will Takeaway
GenAI will produce APIs and code to consume APIs
01.
02. API Engineers will be strategic and intuitive

3. GenAI API Role
Build
Plan
Deploy
Buil
d
Publish
Deprecate
Retir
e
Run
Producing
APIs
Developing
Applications
that consume
APIs
GenAI: API Consumption
• API Discovery
• Code (API Invocation) Generation
• Test Generation
• API Specification
• Test Generation
• Documentation
GenAI: API Production

4. 4 © 2023 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and its affiliates.

5. RESTRICTED DISTRIBUTION
5 © 2024 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

6. RESTRICTED DISTRIBUTION
6 © 2024 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
The May 2023 Gartner IT Leader Poll on Generative AI for Software
Engineering:
• 13% of respondents are using AI coding assistants
• 36% are currently investigating
• 52% of respondents will use GenAI to build software in the future
How to Use Generative AI to Boost Developer Productivity

7. RESTRICTED DISTRIBUTION
7 © 2024 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Application development:
• By 2027, 90% of enterprises will actively use AI tools in their software
development
• Developers will transition to more strategic, creative and value-driven
roles
Invest Implications: Top 3 Infrastructure Software Markets Impacted by Generative AI

8. RESTRICTED DISTRIBUTION
8 © 2024 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Build an
API…
I need…
Schemas
API Standards
API
Documentation
API
Use Cases

9. 9 © 2023 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and its affiliates.
APIs
Human Built
Tool Built
GenAI Built

10. 10 © 2023 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and its affiliates.
Brass
String
Wind
Orchestrate

11. 11 © 2023 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and its affiliates.
Common Notation
440hz Tuning
Orchestration

12. 12 © 2023 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and its affiliates.
API Design
Standards
API
Documentation
APIs
Orchestration

13. RESTRICTED DISTRIBUTION
14 © 2024 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
By 2026, more than 70% of independent software vendors (ISVs) will
have embedded generative AI capabilities in their enterprise applications

14. RESTRICTED DISTRIBUTION
15 © 2024 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
LLMs as API Consumers
• Drives requirement for publishing API metadata, which LLMs consume
• Rate-limiting more important than ever
"What is new today in 2023 is the rise of a new kind of API
consumer—generative AI. LLMs can process OpenAPI descriptions and then use that API to solve problems. With
generative AI’s ability to understand natural language, OpenAPI can help bring the power of APIs to non-developers with a level of
accessibility never seen before. To fully realize this potential, API producers should
decorate their mechanical descriptions of HTTP requests with details
that convey the meaning and purpose of those API operations. This, in turn, helps both people and LLMs to achieve better results.“
https://www.openapis.org/blog/2023/12/06/openapi-moonwalk-2024

15. GenAI & AI Roles
Build
Plan
Deploy
Buil
d
Publish
Deprecate
Retir
e
Run
Producing
APIs
Developing
Applications
that consume
APIs
AI: API Client
• Unified APIs for AI Access
• AI Assisted Prompt Engineering
• AI Response Augmentation
GenAI: API Consumption
• API Discovery
• Code (API Invocation) Generation
• Test Generation
• API Specification
• Test Generation
• Documentation
GenAI: API Production

16. RESTRICTED DISTRIBUTION
17 © 2024 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
By 2026, nearly 80% of prompting will be semiautomated
How to Choose an Approach for Deploying Generative AI

17. API Responsibility
API Specification Generate Gatekeeper
Test Scripts Generate Gatekeeper
Documentation Generate Gatekeeper
API Invocation (Code) Generate Gatekeeper
Prompt Engineering Assist Owner
API Solution Architecture NA Owner

20. 21 © 2023 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and its affiliates.
Takeaways
GenAI will produce APIs and code to consume APIs
01.
02. API Engineers will be strategic and intuitive

21. Reliability
Acceptance
Governance
Cost of Orchestration Offsets
Productivity
Black Box Conditions
Existing APIs Lacking Specifications
GenAI Cautions

22. RESTRICTED DISTRIBUTION
23 © 2024 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
How can I improve developer experience to
improve productivity and retention?
How can I ensure that security is built into the
software engineering process?
Top questions from other leaders
Software engineering leaders turn to Gartner to answer
their most pressing questions across today’s top issues
How can I make the business case for and then
implement platform engineering?
How should my teams be leveraging AI coding
assistants to increase the quality of our code?
How can I justify investment from leadership to
fix technical debt?
How can I measure and improve developer
productivity?
How should my platform engineering teams
augment DevOps using AI?
How can I best leverage open-source while still
meeting reliability and security requirements?
How can I better leverage AI in Design to
speed delivery of a better UX?
How can I optimize our use of outsourced
development teams?

23. 24 © 2023 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and its affiliates.
Access to Gartner research is subject to entitlement. For information, please contact your Gartner representative.
Gartner Recommended Research
• How to Use Generative AI to Boost Developer Productivity
Keith Mann, Frank O'Connor (G00796876)
• Data on Generative AI: Board Presentation
Justin Tung, Rita Sallam (G00805482)
• Innovation Guide for Generative AI Models
Arun Chandrasekaran, Arnold Gao, Ben Yan (G00800194)