I’ve been sitting and simmering on my thoughts in response to this post from my friend Dave Shanley for some time now—you can also hear him think out loud in our conversation. I love leaving these notes open, working on my emotions and my responses to these moments. And as I work hard to reinvent API Evangelist over the summer to speak to this moment—where APIs are 100x as important as they have ever been, and 100x less cool to be talking about—I feel like I have a healthy perspective on where AI has taken us.
I spent about five solid years where APIs enjoyed massive investment from VCs, and it wasn’t until that began to shrink, and eventually collide with this AI moment, that I fully understood what it meant to be in the echo chamber with the wind at our back. As I do the hard work of rebuilding API Evangelist as a media site in the AI age, without the wind in my sails that I once had, I feel like I have a lot of wisdom to apply as part of my work. It really helped me to have spent the last year immersed in AI, orienting myself to where we are at as engineers and entrepreneurs.
We are sitting with front row seats within the one sector in which AI has seen success, with massive venture-backed winds at our back. Most other industries are not seeing the returns on AI, and with the large costs associated—which will only increase—combined with other market and legal challenges, and an increasingly fraught and diverse regulatory landscape emerging, massive headwinds will emerge across most mainstream industries.
AI is virtual for us, but it is very physical for most, in the form of data centers, labor, and other realities. Most people fucking hate it, and just see rich white dudes getting richer. Once the money begins drying up—and it will—we will feel it. While tech feels like everything, it is #3 behind finance and healthcare, trailed by retail and consumer goods. Finance bros don’t care about us, healthcare is regulated like a mofo, and retail is very physical and very real.
AI will shrink back down alongside the ML we’ve been using for many, many years, and the EDI, APIs, events, and other tools in our toolbox. It ain’t going anywhere, but the winds won’t be at our back for much longer. Where I am at with APIs right now, the AI champions will be in a couple of years. Once all the financial bros have moved on to whatever is next, the AI champions are going to feel as lost as I have for the last year with APIs. However, I’d argue that APIs are more foundational than AI, and as AI shrinks back into our technology toolbox, we’ll all have to work together to make a living and keep our businesses afloat.
