This article first appeared in Digital Edge, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on January 24, 2022 - January 30, 2022

It looks like the virus is not going away anytime soon. But as Singapore has seen the lowest number of Covid-19 infections reported in nearly two months, people have started to gradually return to a more normal life while maintaining the necessary safety measures.

Looking beyond our national borders, despite the pandemic, SpaceX’s Inspiration4 has completed the first all-civilian space flight mission and sales on China’s Singles’ Day have set a new record.

Even with travel restrictions and social distancing measures in place, the world is now more connected than ever. Connectivity is like electricity — we can’t imagine living in this world now without connectivity, just like how we can’t go back to the days without electricity.

During the pandemic, there has been an accelerated adoption of digital technology as governments and businesses try to cope with social distancing measures while ensuring business continuity and preventing further service interruptions.

An array of service providers, ranging from telecommunications and e-commerce to education and healthcare, has bred new consumer purchasing behaviour that demands faster, more responsive and frictionless experiences online.

Most enterprises are striving to keep pace with changing consumer demand, regardless of the industry they are in.

As customers adjusted to new social parameters at the start of the pandemic, their expectations of a more seamless shopping experience increased. The demand for IT innovation took on new urgency as 40 million more people across Southeast Asia came online for the first time in 2020.

The proliferation of devices and applications underlines the importance of IT agility. For businesses today, application programming interfaces (APIs) have become the indispensable connective tissue to connect data, applications and systems. APIs allow businesses to scale quickly and react better to digitally tightened gaps.

Today’s brands recognise the difficulty in building personalised customer experiences due to siloed customer data, distributed identity and extended development cycles.

Today’s consumers have grown accustomed to the highly curated online shopping experience, and hyper-personalisation is the top-of-the-line method for a business to tailor its products to the “right customer”. Having a comprehensive perspective of data will provide businesses with meaningful and actionable insights to understand and identify customer demand.

Well-designed, efficient and agile APIs are the backbone of running a digital business successfully. APIs are programming code that allow applications — and their associated services and products — to “talk” to each other in an interconnected world.

At the current pace of application development, APIs help developers speed up software development for customer-facing applications, open applications up to third parties for new use cases, and connect and streamline internal business operations. APIs play critical roles in the real world, whether we realise it or not.

APIs are used in a great variety of sectors as they provide useful business opportunities to enhance customer requirements and relevance. For instance, insurance carriers use APIs to give controlled access to third-party agents to get policy quotes. Instead of needing the carrier to process the request manually, APIs automate it for the agent to display quotes to potential customers.

Singapore’s insurance carriers deliver end-to-end insurance transactional APIs for seamless and customised insurance protection and assistance across their website and applications. Anchoring on insurance-as-a-service (IaaS), their APIs streamline processes such as subscription, quotation and customer policy issuance. In the age of the customer, businesses have to provide a seamless digital experience across their websites and mobile platforms to improve their revenue and their chances of retaining customers.

In the banking sector, APIs are set to be future-ready as customers want fluidity in their services and transactions through their digital wallets.

In Malaysia, banks have established quick response (QR) payments through the use of APIs after seeing a more than tenfold growth in their transactions. The QR method provides automation processes that help businesses enhance their digital productivity, allowing instant payments to be collected without the need to switch their payment process.

APIs also power many apps and capabilities in mobile devices and wearables that help navigate life during the pandemic. Countries in Southeast Asia have developed contact tracing apps that can identify Covid-19 hotspots and send out vaccination appointments, apart from having check-in and check-out capabilities and information on the latest pandemic guidelines. In 2020, Malaysia launched the MySejahtera app that composites all its features using APIs.

The foundation of autonomous driving in cars such as those of Tesla is enabled by the power of APIs. The futuristic feature makes use of cameras, sensors, data and real-time processing capabilities. In a highly competitive automotive industry, Tesla provides the highest customer satisfaction because of its personalised services, treating its customers as individuals.

APIs have evolved from a technical requirement to becoming a linchpin of businesses. The value of APIs have expanded as they enable companies to adopt automation-driven workflows.

Automation allows businesses to reduce human errors in operational processes, as even a recognised repetitive task could bring about different results when accomplished by different people.

Automating a task assures that it would be completed in a uniform manner each time, with benefits such as efficiency and operational reliability. Companies that adopt API-based systems in their business will progress from a hands-on workflow to relying on automated processes. This is the path that will lead to end-to-end infrastructure visibility, the ability to trace and observability.

APIs enable collaborations between applications to carry out functions based on data sharing. They act as intermediaries, giving permission to developers to build new programmable interactions among the numerous programs that people and enterprises utilise each day. They are also vital in automated work processes, removing work that requires a lot of time — for instance, data can now be transferred seamlessly instead of having to be manually keyed in, allowing a business to focus on other more important work.

The future of APIs is bright, and they are critical for business innovation in a digital-first world. In the new year, immense opportunities lie ahead of us and we will continue to make progress and achieve breakthroughs in a digital and connected fashion. Our lives will be better thanks to all the new and improved digital experiences, empowered by APIs and connectivity.

Degui Xu is a senior solutions engineer at Kong Inc, a software company offering open source platforms and cloud services, and a domain expert in the API space

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