Who Will Take Onwership On API Consumption?

One question I find myself coming back to in conversations with industry leaders, API enthusiasts, analysts, and our own customers and community members is this: Who really owns API consumption management? This is  no longer a side consideration. 

We’re at a turning point where API consumption is becoming foundational to many organizations. As companies increase their reliance on external APIs—from connecting to essential AI services to enabling data integrations and powering complex workflows—it’s clear that handling this effectively goes beyond just adding APIs. It’s about managing production and architecture and API consumption at scale, optimizing for costs, ensuring performance, and keeping data secure. This level of API reliance suggests a need for dedicated ownership, maybe even a new role in the organization. This is where I believe things are headed, although, like anything in tech, we’ll see how it unfolds.

Current lack of organizational ownership - What does it teach us today? 

One of the big reasons that API consumption management lacks clear ownership is that it’s a multidisciplinary challenge. Unlike classic API management—which focuses on exposing and controlling access to a company’s own APIs—API consumption deals with managing how we use third-party APIs. And using APIs at scale requires visibility across costs, reliability, usage, performance, and security, which spans multiple teams and often gets divided up between different owners. 

For example, cost management alone is a complex area. APIs often charge based on usage, so monitoring API calls can be crucial for staying within budget. But who should handle this? It could fall under a finance or FinOps team, but they’re typically not involved with day-to-day API operations. Without centralized ownership, teams often realize costs are rising only after the bill comes in, especially when high-traffic APIs, like OpenAI’s GPT or Google Maps, are in play.

Then there’s the issue of reliability and visibility of API usage. visibility into an external API’s uptime or latency is rarely as straightforward as monitoring internal systems. Take a scenario where a CRM integration with Salesforce or HubSpot fails: customer support, sales operations, and data teams are impacted, each potentially scrambling for a solution. Yet, no single team is dedicated to overseeing these external API dependencies.

Similarly, performance and optimization present another ownership gap. With internal APIs, teams can usually optimize as needed, but with external APIs, we’re at the mercy of the provider’s performance. Here, a development team or DevOps might step in to improve reliability by adding caching, rate limiting, or fallback options to reduce the load on costly or slow APIs.Last -  security. External APIs introduce a new layer of risk since every third-party connection could be a potential vulnerability. Security teams might manage access and encryption policies, but they’re not typically involved in monitoring how API keys are used day-to-day.If there was one person to own this specific domain at your organization, it would also require a wide set of skills and hands on experience - which comes with haven't tried and tested integrations, maintenance, scale, security and client management. 

Overall, API consumption management is still a young discipline, and the fact that it spans so many areas—finance, reliability, security, and optimization—explains why no single team has emerged to fully own it. Each team sees parts of the problem but not necessarily the whole, which leads to fragmentation in how it’s managed. As organizations continue to scale their reliance on APIs, this fragmented ownership model is becoming increasingly unsustainable, and it’s leading us toward a future where dedicated roles and new responsibilities might finally fill this gap.

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The best for the job 

Given the multidisciplinary nature of API consumption, several existing teams within organizations seem like a better fit for this responsibility, though the best fit can vary based on company size and structure. Here’s a look at some potential candidates and how their current responsibilities align with API consumption management.

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1. Platform Engineering Team

Why They’re a Good Fit: Platform engineering teams are foundational to building and maintaining the infrastructure that powers the entire organization. Their expertise in creating centralized tools and observability frameworks for infrastructure, scaling, and reliability positions them well to manage API consumption across the organization. They’re skilled in setting standards and ensuring consistency, making them ideally suited to handle API traffic monitoring and enforce best practices.

Why They Don’t Fully Own It Yet: Despite their strengths, platform engineering teams are often stretched thin, especially in large organizations where they already shoulder a broad array of infrastructure tasks. Adding the responsibility of API-specific tasks could detract from their primary infrastructure duties, and the nuanced requirements of API consumption management might risk diluting their focus on core responsibilities like reliability and scalability.

2. DevOps

Why They’re a Good Fit: DevOps teams are adept at automating processes, monitoring performance, and optimizing system reliability, all of which are crucial to API consumption management. They have a natural advantage in smaller organizations where they can more easily integrate error tracking and resilience directly into API connections, helping to maintain high availability and performance for systems that rely on external APIs.

Why They Don’t Fully Own It Yet: DevOps already handles a broad range of responsibilities tied to the entire development lifecycle. In organizations with growing API dependencies, adding in-depth API cost management and monitoring could stretch their focus too thin, limiting the time they can dedicate to optimizing API usage and cost efficiency specifically, which are increasingly essential as companies scale.

3. The Application Developer (Business Logic Owner)

Why They’re a Good Fit: Application developers, who directly handle API interactions as part of business logic, possess a deep understanding of how APIs function within the context of product needs. This insight allows them to recognize where optimizations are needed to enhance performance and cost-effectiveness. In startups and small companies, developers can manage API consumption within their usual development work, creating efficiencies with minimal overhead.

Why They Don’t Fully Own It Yet: While developers might take on this responsibility in smaller setups, asking them to monitor and optimize API consumption as companies scale can result in overextension. For mid-to-large organizations, developers are typically focused on feature development and product iteration, and having them manage API costs and usage on top of that can compromise productivity and scalability, making this a less sustainable option.

4. Integrations Team

Why They’re a Good Fit: Integrations teams focus on establishing and maintaining third-party connections to internal systems, making them well-positioned to oversee the reliability and performance of key API interactions. They understand the intricacies of external connections and can ensure that these integrations align with internal standards and SLAs.

Why They Don’t Fully Own It Yet: While integrations teams are effective in managing individual connections, API consumption management demands continuous monitoring and optimization, which may not align with their project-based approach. The ongoing nature of API consumption, particularly as dependencies increase, requires sustained oversight, which can clash with the often transactional nature of the integrations team’s work.

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5. AI Engineers

Why They’re a Good Fit: With AI’s rapid adoption, AI engineers are uniquely positioned to understand the performance and quota requirements of AI-specific APIs, which often involve costly or rate-limited calls for model inference and data processing. As organizations increasingly adopt AI agents and autonomous systems, AI engineers can play a critical role in managing the usage and reliability of these APIs, particularly as they relate to AI workflows.

Why They Don’t Fully Own It Yet: AI engineers are typically focused on optimizing models and ensuring data processing efficiency. Broadening their scope to include general API consumption management risks pulling them away from their core work on AI model performance. In companies with significant API usage beyond AI, the wider demands of API consumption management might be too much of a stretch for AI engineers to handle effectively while still maintaining their focus on advancing AI capabilities.

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API Consumption Manager?

Personally, I believe that the connectivity of applications to external sources—predominantly APIs but sometimes even web scrapers—will soon demand a dedicated role. With organizations increasingly dependent on external APIs for critical functions, we’re going to need someone who owns this space. I’m not necessarily suggesting a whole team, but a dedicated engineer to serve as a single point of responsibility would make a lot of sense. And if I were to place this role somewhere, I think it would fit well under the platform team.

Why the platform team? API consumption management is an infrastructure-level need that supports multiple departments, from DevOps to security, FinOps, and application development teams. This role—the API Consumption Manager, if you will—would manage the right platform (think an API consumption gateway), building out monitoring, extracting insights, and defining policies to manage outgoing traffic. By centralizing these functions, the platform would serve as the “control tower” that the different roles in the organization could rely on, all with a clear point of contact.

The need for this kind of role will become even more critical as companies push AI agents into production and fully adopt AI capabilities as part of their offerings. With AI models and agents interacting autonomously with external APIs, the demands on infrastructure will increase significantly. Gartner predicts that “By 2028, one-third of interactions with GenAI services will invoke action models and autonomous agents for task completion” (Gartner, 2024). This trend suggests we’ll see the need for a dedicated API Consumption Manager—or perhaps an “Egress Engineer”—emerge over the next two years as AI-powered interactions ramp up.

Even if we’re not quite at the point of creating a new job title, it’s worth thinking about this type of ownership today. Organizations need proper management of API consumption and egress traffic to get the most out of these external integrations while keeping costs and security in check. Whether we end up calling it an API Consumption Manager, Egress Engineer, or something else entirely, one thing’s clear: managing external API connections well is going to be crucial for businesses moving forward.

Let’s see where this journey takes us!

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