I've heard a fair few businesses scratching their heads about the best way to use AI. But I would argue that it's also well worth considering how best to let AI use your business.

What do I mean by that?🤔

Well, late last year, Daniel Miessler wrote this very long but also very prescient piece outlining his predictions for AI:
https://danielmiessler.com/p/ai-predictable-path-7-components-2024

And today in a broader publication I saw this article by CNET:
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/your-apps-are-on-borrowed-time-ai-agents-are-on-the-way/

You're probably noticing that AI 'Agents' are now being talked about almost more than AI itself and with good reason. It's these agents who will interact with the APIs.

The effect of this shift will be twofold:

1️⃣ Businesses who adopt an 'AP-I can do it' mentality will prosper, massively. While impressive, the recent Claude 'computer use' demos are unfortunately not the answer in the same way that Robotic Process Automation was never the long-term answer either. They're useful but ultimately just band-aids until we can adopt API-enabled tech.

It's unrealistic to think that AIs should have to use the same Apps and Websites that were originally intended for humans. In the same way we used to make our websites SEO friendly, we now need to make our businesses AI-friendly. And to do that, you're going to need an API.

For example, Shopify's Storefront API already demonstrates how this could work - it lets anyone browse products and complete purchases programmatically. While not specifically designed for AI agents, it shows how commerce can be made programmatically accessible without requiring special authentication beyond the basic trust signals of valid payment and shipping details. This same pattern could be applied to all sorts of businesses, so it's worth taking a moment to ask yourself how this line of thinking could be applied to your business.

2️⃣ All the 'optimisation', slick marketing and sales tactics won't save us when Agents become the world's most discerning shoppers on behalf of their users. Long range, I believe agents will become the primary purchasing decision-makers. Their API calls will demand honest specifications for your product or service and consequently, you will not be able to bullshit them. We will need to focus less on bullshitting and more on improving our products. Google search results already partly decide which products will get the most sales, AI Agents will just increase this effect.

There are probably already SEO agencies out there eagerly rebranding themselves to 'AI'O which is fine in a world where AI is just a chatterbox. But when the norm becomes that AIs are able to 'do' things via Agents (and by that, I mean properly do things, not like the rabbit r1 🤭) the public face of your business won't be a website or an app - it'll be an API.

As Naval Ravikant famously said:
👉You’re doing sales because you failed at marketing.
👉You’re doing marketing because you failed at product.

In an API-first world, what else matters but the product?