API integration

01why it matters for a business

Integration is where most of the value in business software, and in AI, actually gets unlocked. An AI agent is only as useful as the systems it can read from and act in, and those connections are API integrations, often exposed to the model as tools or through an MCP server. The quality of the integrations decides whether automation is reliable or brittle.

Good integrations handle the unglamorous details: authentication and secrets management, rate limits, retries when a system is down, duplicate prevention, mapping between different field definitions, logging, and alerting. Vendors' APIs also differ widely in quality and coverage, so an early check of what each system's API can and cannot do saves expensive surprises mid-project.

02what it looks like in practice

A wholesale business takes orders on an e-commerce platform, manages stock in an ERP, and invoices through accounting software. Staff copy orders across by hand each morning. An integration picks up new orders through the e-commerce platform's API, checks stock and creates the sales order in the ERP, creates the invoice in the accounting system, and writes tracking numbers back when orders ship. Failures, such as an unknown SKU, go to a queue with the reason attached instead of disappearing.

03common mistakes

• Assuming a system has an API that does what you need. Check coverage, limits, and cost before committing.
• Point-to-point connections with no logging, which make failures invisible.
• Hard-coded credentials and no plan for rotating them.
• No protection against duplicates, so a retry creates a second order or invoice.

04related terms

• Workflow automationWorkflow automation is the use of software to carry out the steps of a business process, such as moving data between systems, routing approvals, sending notifications, and updating records, without a person doing each step by hand.
• Tool use (function calling)Tool use, also called function calling, is the ability of a language model to request that your software run a specific function, such as looking up an order, querying a database, or sending a message, with structured inputs the model fills in.
• Model Context Protocol (MCP)The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard, introduced by Anthropic in 2024, for connecting AI applications to external tools and data.
• Extract, transform, load (ETL)ETL stands for extract, transform, load: the process of pulling data out of source systems, cleaning and reshaping it into a consistent format, and loading it into a destination such as a data warehouse.
• EHR integrationEHR integration is connecting an electronic health record system, such as Epic, Oracle Health, or athenahealth, with other software so patient, scheduling, clinical, and billing data can flow between them.

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