---
published: true
layout: post
title: 'Business Capabilities Provide the Context You Need for AI Engineering'
image: https://kinlane-images.s3.amazonaws.com/apievangelist/api-evangelist-images/business-capabilities-provide-the-context-you-need-for-ai-engineering.png
date: 2026-10-08
author: Kin Lane
tags:
  - Business Capabilities
  - API Products
  - Context Engineering
  - AI
  - Leadership
  - Enterprise
  - APIs.io
  - APIs
---
I have been talking about capabilities for about two years now as some mystical, far-off destination I was headed toward from the landing of API engineering. A focus on API products was one of the reasons I left Postman for Bloomberg, and since leaving Bloomberg I have been searching for meaningful narratives that would resonate with business stakeholders and leadership. API products resonate well with the middle run of stakeholders in newer small and medium-sized organizations, but I am still on a quest for what will speak to leadership and larger enterprises.

In my experience, when you speak of products and capabilities, these words need to be rooted in the realities of the market. Your products reflect what your consumers need, and capabilities reflect, well, what you are actually capable of, or need to be capable of. So rather than creating yet another architect-level methodology and framework for all of us pundits to discuss, I have been trying to translate the technical details of our operations, as defined by APIs, into the product and capability definitions that can be used as part of narratives that speak to business stakeholders and leadership. We need the actual evidence from your integrations across internal, first-party, and third-party applications when we tell stories and produce visualizations.

For the first time in this journey I feel like I am getting closer, at scale, to translating the technical details of enterprise operations into the ways people are talking to each other and to their AI solutions about the business capabilities they execute on each day. You can take a look at the [provider profile for Stripe](https://apis.io/providers/stripe/) to get a glimpse of what I am talking about. In between the Kin Score sections, look at the "What this lets a business do" and the "What people ask Stripe" sections. These are everyday [business capabilities](https://apis.io/capabilities/) and phrasing derived from the OpenAPI operations, Arazzo workflows, and Overlays. It is translating the engineering details into business details, working to build bridges between the two realms.

There is still a lot of work ahead of me on this front. I will need domain expertise across industries and areas to bring things home. I will need to be able to keep producing these edges and mappings across hundreds of thousands of APIs. But it is the first time I have gotten this close. I purposefully tackled the messiest space possible before settling in to see what I can do within individual enterprises. I believe strongly that the most important context you can have when using AI should be derived from the APIs you already depend on to operate your business. This context already exists. You just are not harnessing it. This is the context and discovery that will translate your API sprawl into meaningful business outcomes. We just need a way to get all the business and engineering people on the same page.