One of the things Z and I talked about in our recent conversation (that is Zdenek Nemec, of Apiary and Superface) was his engagement with younger engineers and entrepreneurs about how agents will onboard with APIs. The idea is that this new generation of engineers will see things differently and approach all of this without the baggage the rest of us carry. They won’t see the need for portals, documentation, SDKs, and all the other elements we’ve been bringing to the table so that humans and agents can onboard with and use APIs. Yes kids, despite the popular hype messaging, we have long been building for agents in the API space. I hear this line of thinking about the kids seeing things differently a lot. I have for years, but the belief and the urgency have increased dramatically in today’s AI-driven market.
When I was pulling job posts from the Fortune 100 for Q1 and Q2 this year, the top technology keyword referenced was AI. The second was EDI. That represents the spread of the market. It is intoxicating to be young and on the front line of the market. Anything is possible. You simultaneously understand so much, and so little. You see things through a fresh lens, and you approach things in different ways than those who came before you. And yes, the world will be yours to change as you see fit soon enough. The trick is holding on to how you see things now until you actually have the power and control required to implement them in mainstream industries. You see, young people do not have the keys to the kingdom. They don’t yet possess the decision-making power and control to be the change they envision. Sure, they can work to influence and change the market, but seeing their work as the default statement of what should and will be is naive.
Trust me, I see a lot of what they are seeing. Many facets of the Kin Score reflect how the “AI native” generation sees things. They see things very much the way agents see things, and that perspective is what I am working to align with when I slap the Kin Score label on startups. However, many of the startups run by this next generation of entrepreneurs and engineers aren’t walking the walk with what they are selling. Some are, many aren’t. That is because most are just vehicles for their investors, and how the engineers and entrepreneurs see things won’t matter much in the end. They are crash test dummies in a self-driving car, in a fleet (portfolio) of self-driving cars being driven by their investors across a secondary market.
It is easy to get excited looking at the world through the leading edge of the AI market, especially for the natives of this world, or for people who only live in this world. Of course this is the way things work! Of course this is where things are going! The problem comes when these approaches make their way into mainstream and regulated industries. It becomes easy to say that these industries will have to change, and that we shouldn’t have regulation. The reality is that mainstream industries operate the way they do for very good reasons that might not always make sense to people who don’t live and breathe that industry. Some of the regulation likely exists for very good historical reasons that outsiders do not know about, and if you did know them, you might change your tune.
I like the example Z brings up about shipping containers from Prague to the United States. Can an agent make this happen? His conclusion: “not for many years!” Shipping a container from one location to another sounds trivially simple, but there are plenty of devils in those details. Technical ones. Business ones. Political ones. Plenty of details that young entrepreneurs and engineers might not be aware of. Does this mean these industries won’t ever change, and that the AI world won’t eat away at how they operate? No, it will happen. Will it happen at the speed young entrepreneurs and engineers envision? No, it won’t. It will have a meaningful impact on company valuations and shifts in the secondary market, which can feel very, very, very real if that is where your company operates and you use AI for everything. If your company operates in a more mainstream industry, uses EDI as well as APIs to share information, and is regulated by multiple countries, things are going to look very different.
