The majority of my consulting clients are international in this moment. It is interesting to start every meeting with commentary and discussion on the current administration in the United States, but conversations are increasingly also moving towards the alignment of our wider technology and business priorities with this administration. While it is difficult to cut through the noise right now on social media and via search engines, my messages around focusing on the fundamental of HTTP APIs, experience, and governance in this moment is attracting a certain time of international customer who are savvy and know they need to be doing APIs, and see a number of lessons in the US approach to APIs, but not all of these lessons are good.
I am working with a variety of savvy enterprise product managers and architects from almost every region in the world right now on producing APIs, consuming APIs, but also delivering API services and tooling. They are eager to learn from my experience in API strategy, experience, and governance, and awareness of the services and tooling I keep an eye on. I am a big fan of their questions and critical approach to what I have to offer. They aren’t just taking me at my word, learning from what I have to say, but then doing the work within their enterprises and their countries to understand what makes sense when it comes to their world view, and what their people need. There are serious levels of skepticism in the people I am working with and while it can make for some heated discussions and uncomfortable pushback, I find it refreshing compared to what I encounter in the US echo chamber.
It is clear that the US tech sector has jumped the shark, and is operating at overheated and unrealistic levels. We have become a poster child for why you need to embrace data sovereignty, leverage open-source solutions, and be skeptical of artificial intelligence as a Trojan Horse for allowing US companies into your enterprise with unfettered access. The US has long been a model for the rest of the world to follow, so it is super interesting to be having these conversations about us being the model for what not to do. There is a huge appetite for API knowledge right now, but there is a huge amount of skepticism to go along with any conversation, and people see the current AI push by tech sector as completely aligned with the current federal administration, which is something that seems to elude all of those API people working within the echo chamber.
