The Hidden Engineering Cost of Making Your APIs Ready for AI Agents

Susanna Fagerholm — Tue, 05 May 2026 10:30:27 +0000

Your APIs already work for developers. But AI agents are a completely different user. Here’s why the real work starts after the demo.

If we already have APIs, are we ready for AI agents?

The honest answer is: partly.

If your product exposes useful actions through a solid API, you can usually get to a demo quickly. A model can call a tool, retrieve data, update a record, or trigger a workflow. That first proof of concept often looks simple.

The hard part starts when agents act on behalf of real users in real customer environments.

That is where delegated authority, tenant isolation, policy enforcement, observability, and failure handling become load-bearing concerns. Making endpoints callable is the easy part. Building the control layer around those calls is where the real engineering cost sits.

The market pressure is real. Gartner predicts that by 2028, 33% of enterprise software applications will include agentic AI, up from less than 1% in 2024. Gartner also expects at least 15% of day-to-day work decisions to be made autonomously through agentic AI by 2028.

Adoption is moving fast. PwC’s May 2025 AI agent survey found that 79% of companies were already adopting AI agents, while 88% planned to increase AI-related budgets because of agentic AI. McKinsey’s 2025 global survey found that 23% of organizations were scaling agentic AI somewhere in the enterprise, with another 39% experimenting.

APIs are the starting point

Most APIs were designed for developers.

Developers can read documentation, infer context, handle edge cases, and work around inconsistent behavior. Agents operate differently. They choose tools, sequence actions, and interpret outputs inside a probabilistic runtime. Any ambiguity in your API design, permissions model, or execution flow can be amplified.

MCP, or Model Context Protocol, has become one of the most visible open standards for connecting AI applications to external systems. It gives teams a more structured way to expose data, tools, and workflows to AI agents.

An API endpoint answers the question: “Can this action be called?”

An agent-ready system has to answer a bigger question: “Should this action happen, for this user, in this tenant, under these conditions, with this audit trail?”

That difference is where many early projects get caught out.

The real system is the control layer

Agent enablement can look like a thin interface project at first. Add MCP. Wrap a few endpoints. Improve the docs. Ship the demo.

In practice, the real deliverable is a governed execution layer.

A governed execution layer is the part of the system that mediates between AI-driven intent and operational systems. It decides who the action is for, what tenant it belongs to, which tools should be available, which actions need approval, and how the system explains what happened afterward.

For B2B SaaS platforms, especially embedded platforms, this starts to look more like core product infrastructure than a single feature.

This is where platforms such as Cyclr help. Cyclr is an embedded iPaaS, meaning an integration platform as a service that SaaS companies can embed into their own products. It helps teams deliver, manage, and control native integrations at scale, with access to 600+ connectors.

Cyclr can accelerate the connectivity layer. Cyclr’s MCP PaaS extends that thinking into MCP server creation and publication, helping software companies create and publish MCP servers natively inside their applications.

That is a strong foundation. The engineering question that remains is how your product governs agent execution on top of it.

Authorization becomes more than access control

Traditional integrations often start with a token, a role, and a set of API permissions.

Agent-facing systems need more context.

If an agent is asked to update a customer record, retrieve sensitive data, or trigger a workflow, the system has to understand the situation around the request. Is the agent acting on behalf of a specific user? Is the action allowed by tenant policy? Should it proceed automatically, or pause for human approval?

Access control says what an identity can do. Agent authorization also has to evaluate whether an action is appropriate in the current context.

That means delegated authority needs to be explicit. Execution scope needs to be bounded. Customer controls need to be configurable. Audit trails need to show what happened in language support teams and customers can understand.

For products serving many customers, that distinction is foundational. Trust depends on control being visible.

Multi-tenancy changes the cost model

A single-tenant demo can make almost any architecture look clean.

Multi-tenant SaaS changes the picture. Tenant context affects credentials, policies, available actions, rate limits, approval requirements, data boundaries, and support workflows. Once agents are involved, all of those concerns become part of the execution path.

Tenant-awareness has to be carried into tool resolution, policy checks, secret handling, logging, and orchestration. Otherwise, isolation becomes fragile.

Embedded integration platforms like Cyclr are built with multi-tenancy as a core assumption. That matters because agent execution needs the same instinct: every customer needs control over what is exposed, what is enabled, and what can happen inside their environment.

For AI agents, customization becomes part of safe execution.

Reliability means semantic consistency

Availability is only one part of reliability.

A human developer can work around a vague error, an undocumented side effect, or an endpoint that behaves differently depending on hidden state. Agents are less forgiving. They need tools with clear contracts.

Inputs should be explicit. Outputs should be predictable. Failure states should be interpretable. Side effects should be clear. Retry behavior should be safe.

When those properties are missing, teams may blame the model. In many cases, the issue is the tool surface. The agent is operating against systems designed for human-led execution.

Agent-readiness exposes API design debt.

Observability becomes part of the product

When an agent behaves unexpectedly, engineering teams need more than service-level logs.

They need to understand the path from request to action. What was asked? What did the model infer? Which tools were available? Which tool was selected? Which policy checks ran? What response came back? Where did the execution branch or fail?

Customers experience agent behavior as product behavior. If an agent triggers the wrong workflow or returns the wrong result, the product needs to explain why.

This is one reason managed infrastructure choices matter. A well-designed MCP PaaS can reduce the amount of protocol, hosting, versioning, and instrumentation work a product team has to own. Cyclr’s MCP PaaS is positive for this kind of roadmap because it builds on Cyclr’s multi-tenanted integration architecture and gives SaaS teams a practical route to embedded MCP capability.

Governance has to be designed early

There is a temptation to prove the use case first and add governance later, but it's risky.

McKinsey’s agentic AI security guidance says existing enterprise cybersecurity frameworks such as ISO 27001, NIST CSF, and SOC 2 currently leave gaps around autonomous agents that can act with discretion and adaptability. McKinsey recommends updating risk and governance frameworks before deployment.

Once an agent can take meaningful action, governance becomes part of the execution model. Some operations need approval. Some tools should be blocked by default. Some data paths need tighter controls. Some workflows may be safe for one tenant and inappropriate for another.

A production-ready system can pause, constrain, route, log, and explain execution according to policy. A system limited to invoking endpoints carries greater exposure.

The build vs. buy decision is really about ownership

Teams often frame this as a feature decision: build the agent layer or use a platform.

A better question is: what operating model do you want to own?

If you build in-house, you are building much more than a tool interface. Over time, you are also building tenant-aware execution, policy controls, traceability, secret management, schema normalization, lifecycle management, versioning, support tooling, and incident response workflows.

That may be the right choice for some teams. But it should be planned as platform architecture, rather than a quick interface project.

Cyclr and MCP PaaS solve real problems in this stack. Cyclr helps SaaS companies scale embedded integrations without turning every customer connection into custom development. MCP PaaS helps teams expose product capabilities to AI agents through a more standardized and manageable layer.

Together, Cyclr and MCP PaaS give SaaS teams a stronger starting point for agent-ready architecture: scalable connectivity, embedded integration infrastructure, and a practical path to exposing product capabilities through MCP.

What agent-readiness should mean

Agent-readiness is more than an API quality score.

A system is agent-ready when it can safely mediate between probabilistic decision-making and deterministic business operations. That means:

Identity is explicit.
Authorization is enforceable.
Tenant boundaries are preserved.
Tool contracts are reliable.
Execution is observable.
Governance is built into the flow.

That is a stricter definition than most teams start with, and it is the useful one.

Strong APIs are a genuine advantage in the shift toward AI agents. They are also the beginning of a larger architecture.

An AI agent can probably already call your API. The question worth asking is whether your architecture can contain, govern, and explain what happens after it does.

Is SaaS Dead?

Susanna Fagerholm — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 11:18:51 +0000

There's been a lot of noise lately about whether SaaS is dead. Spoiler: it's not. But the way people use SaaS is changing in a pretty significant way.

If we think about how media has evolved, we can see that history has a pattern here. Radio didn't kill newspapers, TV didn't kill radio, streaming didn't kill TV. But each shift changed how people consumed media, and those who adapted survived. SaaS is about to face its own version of that shift.

The "Headless SaaS" Wave

Here's the change that's coming: a significant chunk of SaaS users will stop using SaaS UIs directly. Instead, they're using AI agents and LLMs to do it for them.

So instead of logging in, navigating dashboards and clicking through workflows, users issue commands through a conversational interface:

"Update that record."
"Pull last quarter's churn drivers."
"Generate a renewal forecast."
"Create onboarding tasks for this new client."

The SaaS app doesn't disappear. It becomes infrastructure, handling the stuff that actually requires structure: data integrity, permissions, compliance, domain logic. The AI layer just sits on top and acts as the interface.

What This Means for the SaaS Stack

Right now, most SaaS products are optimized around the UI. Product investment has focused on features, workflows and dashboards, and for good reason since that's where users spent their time.

As AI agents become more capable, though, a bigger share of users will operate "headlessly." They'll delegate execution to an AI and never open the dashboard. The SaaS back-end still does all the work. The front-end just becomes one of several possible entry points.

The future stack looks something like:

Back-end: Structured data, domain logic, permissions, compliance
Interface layer: Traditional UI plus AI-driven, conversational or agent-based access

For many users, the AI becomes the primary operating environment for work.

The Strategic Dilemma for SaaS Companies

This creates a thorny set of questions for product teams:

If the UI isn't the primary engagement point, what's your differentiator?
If AI agents call your API directly, who owns the customer relationship?
If multiple LLMs are hitting your endpoints, how do you enforce security, governance, and tenancy isolation?

SaaS companies have historically optimized for UI/UX, feature depth, and native integrations. Now they also need to optimize for:

API completeness and consistency
Machine-readable action schemas
Monitoring of AI-driven traffic
Secure mediation between external agents and internal systems

The API is no longer just "for integrations", it is the interface.

This Isn't the Death of SaaS

SaaS as a category is fine. The underlying value of cloud software still matters and still drives real business outcomes.

What's changing is the surface area. The UI was the front door for the last 20 years. Going forward, it'll share that role with AI-driven interaction.

The front-end won't vanish overnight, but it won't be the only front door anymore. The companies that architect for headless, AI-mediated usage early will define the next era of SaaS. The ones that wait may find their API strategy overwhelmed before they've had a chance to adapt.

The directional signal is clear. The question is whether you're building for it now, or scrambling to catch up later.

This post is an adapted version of an article originally published on the Cyclr blog. All credit for the original ideas and content goes to Cyclr CEO, Fraser Davidson.

DEV Community: Cyclr