You Might Be Doing API-First Wrong, New Analyst Research Suggests

Ever feel like you're fighting an uphill battle with your API strategy? You're building APIs faster than ever, but somehow everything feels harder. Wasn’t API-first supposed to make all this easier? 

Well, you're not alone. And now industry analysts are noting it as well. 

New Gartner research on successful API-first integration just came out, and it validates something we've been saying for a while: many organizations are fundamentally misunderstanding what API-first actually means. The result? Friction, frustration, and teams stepping on each other's toes when they should be working together.

The key insight that caught our attention? Organizations need to stop treating API management and integration delivery as the same thing. They require different skills, different teams, and — most importantly — different approaches.

When everything becomes an API problem

Here's what's happening in most organizations right now. Someone decides "we're going API-first" and suddenly every integration team is also responsible for building, maintaining, and governing APIs. On paper, this makes sense. In reality? It's a recipe for chaos.

According to the 2024 Gartner API Strategy Survey, the primary responsibility for API quality and management appears distributed among the integration team, the central IT team, and individual developers. Analysts note an increasing trend of organizations struggling with multiple teams independently developing APIs without consistent standards.

We see this all the time. Integration teams, whose main job should be connecting systems, end up drowning in API governance responsibilities. Meanwhile, application teams are building APIs in isolation, each with their own standards (or lack thereof).

The result? API sprawl, poor governance, and a lagging developer experience. 

4 critical takeaways from the research

Let's dig into the research from Gartner — and how Kong addresses these challenges head-on.

1. You need a dedicated API platform team

This isn't about creating another committee that meets once a month and accomplishes nothing. Instead, the research suggests an alternative:

This cross-functional team, composed of API product managers from different lines of business/teams, software engineers, and optionally domain experts (such as privacy/compliance, performance, and security), will be responsible for defining and enforcing consistent design standards, quality controls, and publishing practices across all APIs.

This is exactly why we built Kong Konnect as the API platform for platform builders. We're giving these teams the foundation and functionality they need to succeed at scale. With centralized observability, policy management, and developer enablement tools, your API platform team can actually focus on strategy instead of fighting fires.

2. AI readiness starts with API governance

Here's where things get really interesting. Gartner predicts that APIs will become integral to the functionality of AI agents, providing these agents with the necessary interfaces to consume, analyze, and act on data. 

Organizations with ungoverned API sprawl? They're going to struggle massively when it comes to scaling AI initiatives.

We've been saying "there's no AI without APIs" for a reason. Your AI agents need clean, discoverable, well-documented APIs to work with. If your API landscape is a mess, your AI initiatives will be too. (This may prove especially problematic for AI projects in highly regulated sectors.)

Kong supports both traditional API management for taming your API sprawl AND leverages our AI Gateway for LLM traffic management. As the AI space continues to rapidly evolve, we're staying at the forefront by investing in the latest standards, like Model Context Protocol (MCP). The research recommends assessing the feasibility of adopting MCP as a standard for structuring and contextualizing API calls made by AI agents.

3. Treat APIs as products, not projects

This one hits close to home. The research emphasizes moving from ad-hoc API creation to intentional, product-centric development. 

APIs are mission-critical infrastructure, but too many organizations build APIs as afterthoughts or side effects of whatever project they're working on. Then they wonder why adoption is low and maintenance is a nightmare. 

Kong tightly integrates gateway runtimes with our next-gen Dev Portal and Service Catalog, enabling true API product management. Your APIs get the product treatment they deserve: proper documentation, lifecycle management, and developer experience that doesn't suck.

4. Enable developers, don't constrain them

Here's the tricky part about governance: it needs to facilitate delivery, not hinder it. Developer experience still must be at the center: 

Kong provides the framework for federated API management — centralized observability and enforcement of best practices combined with dedicated control planes for each team. The result? Autonomy with guardrails. Teams get the freedom they need to move fast, while platform teams maintain the consistency and security they require.

The integration strategy reality check

Now let's talk about what your integration teams should actually be doing. Gartner emphasizes that the primary goal of integration delivery should remain centered on enabling connectivity rather than unnecessarily constructing new interfaces. When well-governed, discoverable APIs meet the functional and non-functional needs, use them. If requirements are better served by existing stable interfaces — native connector, message queue, JDBC/ODBC, file drop, or RPA surface — connect and orchestrate using that interface rather than wrap it with a new API purely for policy uniformity.

In other words: stop building APIs for the sake of building APIs. Sometimes a database connection is just a database connection. Sometimes a message queue is the right tool for the job. API-first doesn't mean API-only.

What this means for the AI era

Here's why this matters more than ever: AI is changing everything about how we think about APIs. To ensure successful AI implementation and prevent common API delivery challenges from undermining AI adoption, organizations need to design APIs for autonomous consumption, provide rich metadata, semantic descriptions, and clear, consistent error messages to enable AI agents to interpret responses and recover from errors autonomously.

The organizations that get API governance right now — the ones that build dedicated platform teams, treat APIs as products, and enable rather than constrain their developers — these are the organizations that will have a massive advantage in the agentic AI era. 

The bottom line

API-first requires dedicated teams with platform thinking, not point integration solutions. It requires treating APIs as strategic assets, not technical afterthoughts. And it requires governance that empowers teams instead of slowing them down.

The research backs up what we've been seeing in the field: organizations that separate API strategy from integration delivery, that invest in proper governance, and that treat APIs as products are the ones succeeding at scale.

Kong was built specifically for these challenges — giving API platform teams the tools they need to govern effectively while giving development teams the freedom to innovate.

Ready to learn more about how Kong Konnect can help you build a world-class API platform? Check out our platform overview or request a demo to see it in action.