Act 2, scene 6: The interface and APIs today

Scene 6: The interface and APIs today

Beneath onboarding are the interface and the APIs. The customer wants screens that fit how their people work, down to the individual user, and increasingly wants their own agents to operate the product. Today every customer sees the same screens, and personalisation stops at the tenant. An API lets a program bypass the screens, through the same service the screens use, and an agent using it still has to learn the product's rules from somewhere else. For a buyer who expects agents to operate the software, a product that needs a person clicking through menus is one their agents cannot use. For the provider, fitting the product to every customer and their agents means hundreds or thousands of screens, fronting a capability described only through forms, APIs and a configuration schema. Modernising them means wireframe, build and review, one screen at a time. Agents make each screen faster, and the cost still grows with the number of screens.