APIs

An API (application programming interface) is a structured way for software systems to communicate with each other. In AI, APIs let applications send data to a model or service and receive back predictions, summaries, classifications, or generated content — without building the underlying model internally. Most enterprise AI deployments rely on APIs: a product calls a language model API, a fraud detection system calls a scoring API, an analytics tool calls an inference API. APIs make AI capabilities accessible, but they also make an organization's data and operations dependent on external systems.

The integration layer is where most of the business risk lives, not the model. Every API call that includes customer data, employee records, or confidential content sends that data to a third-party system — under that vendor's terms, not yours. Pricing is consumption-based and can scale unexpectedly. Vendors deprecate models, change terms, and go offline. Organizations that treat API integrations as a purely technical matter and skip legal review, cost modeling, and contingency planning tend to discover these realities at the worst possible time.