AI agents are quickly becoming the new interface to the internet. While models handle reasoning, APIs let agents act by pulling live data, triggering workflows, and interacting with businesses in real time. As agents move from demos to deployment, APIs are becoming core business infrastructure rather than just developer tools.
For Postman, this shift is familiar territory. Long before AI agents entered the picture, the platform for building and using APIs was built to solve the growing complexity of APIs at scale.
That journey, as co-founder and CTO Ankit Sobti recalled, began not with a grand business plan but with frustration. “I started this as a product in 2012 as a side project,” Sobti said. “It was very much a scratch-your-own-itch problem.”
The growing complexity of working with APIs at scale would eventually turn into one of the world’s most widely used API platforms, now serving over 40 million developers globally.
From a Yahoo Problem to a Global Platform
Postman’s roots lie in Sobti’s experience building APIs inside large organisations like Yahoo.
“We were building an API that every Yahoo vertical depended on—news, sports, finance, the homepage,” he recalled. “We saw the entire lifecycle of building it, operating it, scaling it internally and then exposing it to external customers.”
That experience revealed something deeper than developer convenience. Sobti said they came to understand the challenges of working with APIs not only from a developer’s perspective, but also in terms of how they move the needle for large organisations. It also exposed a gap in the market: the lack of tools focused purely on APIs, not as side infrastructure, but as a first-class product.
Sobti frames APIs as fundamental infrastructure rather than mere technical plumbing.
“APIs are the connective tissue of how the world works today,” he said. “Tens of thousands of developers, across thousands of teams, are building value by using each other’s capabilities.”
This, in his view, is why every organisation is now an API company, whether it realises it or not. “Banks, logistics companies, healthcare, telecom—everyone is opening up APIs,” Sobti quipped. “Either to create new revenue or to support existing revenue.”
The challenge, however, is no longer just building APIs, but managing them at scale.
APIs For AI Agents
Postman is extending its API platform to support AI agent-driven development. The company offers tools to build and test agentic workflows, expose APIs as callable agent tools, and monitor both human and agent usage in real time.
These features include a natural language agent mode, Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration and enterprise observability through Postman Insights.
“Large language models are trained on historical data,” Sobti said. “But APIs allow them to operate in the present moment.”
He offered a simple example: an e-commerce support agent that needs access to real-time shipping status, order details and multilingual responses. According to Sobti, the core challenge is managing the sprawl of APIs across organisations. These APIs must be structured and governed so they can be safely exposed as MCP tools, allowing AI agents to interact with systems reliably and deliver real customer experiences.
He added that this is where Postman is investing heavily—in API catalogues, testing, governance and tools that allow APIs to be exposed reliably to AI-driven workflows.
How AWS Fits Into Postman Strategy
As Postman prepares its platform for agent-driven workflows, partnerships with cloud providers remain central to its strategy. Sobti pointed to the company’s long-standing relationship with Amazon Web Services as an important part of that effort.
“We’ve had a long history in partnership with AWS and are doubling down on that,” Sobti said. Postman is among the early users of AWS’s latest tool, Kiro Powers.
Sobti explained that Kiro Powers works alongside Postman to reduce repetitive setup work in API development and testing. Instead of manually creating requests and configuring environments, Kiro can evaluate an existing Postman workspace and generate a complete API collection with the required endpoints.
“For you to be able to configure Postman, manage tests and manage workspaces from within Kiro Powers itself is fascinating,” Sobti said.
Looking Ahead
One of Postman’s biggest advantages, according to Sobti, is its user base.
“Many users inside organisations who are using Postman, who love the product, who are trained on using the product and using APIs as well. So Postman becomes a very effective distribution channel.”
That developer-first adoption has helped Postman evolve from a tool into a platform used by individuals, teams and enterprises alike.
“We’re at the precipice of fundamentally new consumer experiences,” Sobti said. “We don’t yet know the winning form factor, but conversational agents are clearly one direction.”
What he is certain about is the role APIs will play.
“If agents are how users interact with businesses, and you don’t have APIs to support that, it’s going to be very hard,” Sobti said. “Every company will have to become an API company.”
And in that future, agents may well become the fastest-growing API consumers of all.
The post Why Postman CTO Believes APIs will Define the Era of AI Agents appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.
