At the beginning of July, Gartner unveiled its updated API Hype Cycle, revealing transformative shifts in the industry.

APIs are becoming increasingly integral, particularly with the surge in AI-driven applications.

According to the 2024 Gartner API Strategy Survey, a remarkable 71% of organizations now rely on third-party APIs from SaaS vendors. Among these, generative AI APIs from providers like OpenAI are rapidly gaining traction.

This evolving landscape necessitates a multifaceted approach to API infrastructure, combining diverse gateways, portals, and specialized tools for testing, observability, and monitoring.

Gartner’s Hype Cycle captures this “platform unbundling” trend, highlighting the need for a robust, comprehensive strategy.

I am particularly excited to explore three emerging categories within the “innovation trigger” phase of the Hype Cycle—where groundbreaking technologies ignite innovation and attract new market entrants.

These categories, I believe, signify a profound shift in technology: API Consumption by Generative AI, AI Gateways, and Federated API Gateways.

Together, they represent the dawn of a new era in API utilization and management.

AI Gateways

An AI Gateway, as defined by Gartner, is a solution designed to manage and secure connections to AI providers.

This emerging category is gaining traction, and we at Lunar.dev are proud to be recognized by Gartner alongside established names in the API management space like Kong and IBM.

Traditionally focused on the provider side of APIs, these players are now also addressing the unique challenges of AI API consumption.

For software engineering leaders, AI gateways offer essential security features, such as protecting API keys issued by AI providers, facilitating multi-LLM routing, ensuring cost visibility, and conducting data privacy scanning.

These capabilities are increasingly crucial as the volume and scale of generative AI and other AI projects grow, necessitating dedicated controls to manage API consumption effectively.

AI gateways provide runtime traffic management between organizations and their AI providers.

They enable the implementation and management of prompt-based policy controls, track AI service usage and costs, facilitate routing across multiple LLMs, and manage access to AI subscriptions, including protecting API keys.

API Consumption by Generative AI

This new category highlights a significant shift in the API landscape.

The OpenAI Foundation refers to this as “the rise of a new kind of API consumer—generative AI.”

Generative AI technologies are set to become major consumers of APIs, driven by advancements in AI agents and agentic flows—autonomous systems that perform tasks, make decisions, and interact with their environment independently.

Additionally, developers are increasingly adopting tools such as AI coding assistants, which further propagate API calls.

These tools help developers discover APIs, call APIs, and generate code, tests, and documentation.

Gartner predicts that AI coding assistants will boost developer productivity by 36% by 2028.

The benefit here is clear: using generative AI to assist developers in consuming APIs significantly enhances productivity and improves the overall development experience.

However, this trend also brings new challenges, necessitating a strategic architectural approach to managing GenAI APIs. Key challenges include:

• ‍Security: Ensuring security when GenAI consumes APIs is crucial. This may require implementing robust API security infrastructure, such as an API gateway or, more accurately, an API consumption gateway.‍
• Latency: When GenAI applications consume APIs, they introduce dependencies that can add latency.

As future applications increasingly rely on these AI agents, the need to manage consumption as an infrastructure will become essential.

It’s not just about managing AI APIs; it’s about every external API that AI agents might utilize.

Therefore, API consumption management must address the needs of both AI APIs (like AI Gateways) and the broader API ecosystem.

This comprehensive approach will be vital in navigating the evolving landscape of generative AI and API consumption.

Federated API Gateways

Gartner defines Federated API Gateways as a combination of heterogeneous gateway instances managed by a common control plane.

Organizations often need to use different API gateway technologies within their architectures to suit various circumstances.

This need arises from factors such as adopting cloud provider’s native API gateway services, M&A, and the selection of different gateways to meet functional or operational requirements across different domains, such as open APIs, B2B APIs, internal APIs, or external APIs.

This necessity stems from the demand to choose the best-of-breed API gateway/management solutions in larger organizations.

A single API management solution cannot address all API needs, which is why we see organizations employing multiple gateways tailored to their specific requirements.

As part of the bigger picture, we believe an API Consumption Gateway can coexist with traditional API gateways to offer a holistic approach to managing both external and internal APIs within an organization.

This integrated strategy ensures that all API interactions are effectively managed, providing enhanced security, scalability, and performance across the board.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Gartner’s 2024 API Hype Cycle introduces three transformative categories: AI Gateways, API Consumption by Generative AI, and Federated API Gateways.

These categories collectively underscore the emergence of a new architectural layer within organizations—the need to manage API consumption.

Just as traditional API gateways emerged over a decade ago to help companies proliferate their APIs to customers, we now see a maturing paradigm focused on the consumption side.

The rise of generative AI technologies and AI agents, coupled with the increasing adoption of diverse API gateways tailored to specific needs, calls for dedicated API consumption management.

This comprehensive approach will be essential to manage the surge in API consumption, whether it involves AI APIs or generated API calls by AI agents.

An API consumption gateway will become a critical component, ensuring secure, efficient, and cost-effective use of all APIs within an organization.

I am excited to see how these groundbreaking changes will evolve and shape the future of API management.

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