Running multiple APIs side-by-side with AI paves way to hyperautomation for business
For business, time and money are precious commodities. The rise of the Application Programming Interface, better known as APIs, has streamlined business operations and created a better customer experience. This kind of automation saves businesses both time and money, but also provides valuable data and an improved user experience.
From chatbots to checkout, APIs have become a critical part of running a business in a digital world. Yet, while technology has brought millions of applications to the market built to help businesses improve their operations, the problem is that they often must use three to five APIs separately yet together to get the information and process flow they need for their business.
Building custom APIs can be costly. Running existing APIs side-by-side, instead, can cut costs while catapulting automation and reducing inefficiencies, but it requires a critical missing piece – artificial intelligence.
What it takes to run multiple APIs side-by-side with AI assistance
If you have dabbled around in application development, you may have come across the term API.
Application Programming Interface, or API, is a software intermediary responsible for facilitating communication between two applications. It is the channel that communicates a request to the provider and backtracks the response to the said request with the correct information.
Even though APIs promise a bouquet of benefits by themselves, using them side-by-side can amplify their effects. Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) with multiple APIs can provide even more efficiency and sounder data.
How do APIs work?
A typical API that few of us think about, but appreciate the ease of doing online, is booking a flight.
You, the customer, are on one end of the spectrum, and the airline’s database is at the other end. The API is essentially the link between you and the airline.
Before starting with the booking, you key in various flight-related details, such as your departing airport, arrival airport, date of travel, class, etc. The API collects these details and transfers them to the airline’s website. Based on the inputs, the servers identify the appropriate options and the API fetches these along with the flight costs.
If you need to see more information about a particular flight, the API will once again take this request to the database and return with the relevant details. And finally, when you are all set to finalize and pay for your booking, the API will coordinate action at every step of the process — from flight selection to meal or seat selection to payment and ticket confirmation.
If the API is designed correctly, the whole booking process will take place seamlessly.
Advantages of using multiple APIs in parallel
The above example is an API at work in a single instance. But when multiple APIs operate in tandem, it can render impactful results:
- Greater Efficiency: By connecting APIs or running them in parallel, you can build complex capabilities that do not need to be created from scratch. As such, you can add new functionalities without reinventing the wheel.
- Higher Productivity: APIs help with quick prototyping and product creation. Expedited development timelines offer productivity boosts to build multivariate solutions.
- Data Availability: By setting up complex communication channels, it is possible to transfer data in its various forms and at various stages between different endpoints.
- Improved Collaboration: APIs help improve collaboration and internal communication. However, this effect is multiplied when several APIs operate together.
- Automation: If API brings about the ideal conditions for automation, then multiple APIs side-by-side can pave the way for hyper-automation. They can set up channels of seamless communication and collaboration which can automate processes without a hitch.
- Cost Savings: By reducing the time to market and increasing the revenue potential through benefits like personalization, APIs can be the best way to keep development cost-effective and resource independent.
How AI helps in running multiple APIs side-by-side
APIs play a central role in responding to user activity making API management key to seamless app operation. And the use of AI in API management emerges as a heaven-sent solution through:
Improving processes
The deep learning techniques AI offers use relevant information to gain a more in-depth understanding of the API’s relevance. Given that the technology is at par with human analytical processing, with the added advantage of handling high volumes of data, it is capable of efficient modeling and documentation to streamline API performance. This application can help sharpen API creation and provisioning processes in real-time, which can perfectly orchestrate parallel API performance.
Dynamic scalability
The objective of running multiple APIs side-by-side is to gain additional capabilities or insight within the least amount of time. With AI, this process can be made scalable with continued experimentation and integration of APIs through a self-correcting mechanism. AI tools can monitor metrics to assess future requirements, be it a peak or a dip, and manage APIs accordingly.
Asynchronous operations
With AI in the mix, it is now possible to run APIs in the background to maintain a high degree of responsiveness. Keeping data at hand and maintaining responsiveness can help the application score big on the user interface front. It can also help in running complicated computations and transmission of resulting data sets with minimal downtime. As a result, the app performance can be made uniform, schema-friendly, and protocol-independent.
Hence, booking a flight becomes an easy and seamless process for the end user.
The way forward
Beyond saving time and money and providing a customer experience that delights, the advantages for businesses in using AI-driven APIs are powerful on multiple fronts. And we’re just on the horizon of what’s possible.
Today, retailers and restaurants can combine AI with APIs to follow online sentiment and better track customer reviews for key operational and performance data.
When it comes to building applications that accept visual, language, or speech inputs, AI is an effective tool for deploying and orchestrating multiple APIs for the best information and experience.
For instance, an eCommerce application could translate product catalogs into multiple languages, allow customers to listen to product reviews, and also share personalized recommendations.
Similarly, you can have a chatbot that understands a user’s negative or positive sentiment through voice to offer a satisfactory response.
Using multiple APIs led by AI is innovating operations, processes and leading customer experience, all key to business success. This makes a solid case for AI-driven APIs to lead the way into the future of Artificial General Intelligence.