APIs in the era of agentic AI: Redefining developer experience and commerce

Developer Experience is more than a “nice-to-have” — it’s a business differentiator. Leaders increasingly recognize that a strong DevX directly accelerates delivery, reduces time to market and boosts overall ROI. After all, developers are deeply embedded in business value creation — from integrations, automation and AI to customer-facing features.

At the heart of modern developer experiences is APIs (application programming interfaces): A set of rules and endpoints that lets different software systems communicate with each other, request data and trigger actions in a consistent, secure way. 

While APIs aren’t necessarily new, many organizations have taken a long time to benefit from an API-first approach, which means designing and building APIs before developing applications, user interfaces or integrations. Following this approach, APIs are treated as the primary product, with clear contracts, documentation, versioning and standards defined upfront so that any team — internal or external — can reliably build on top of them.

An API-first strategy directly improves how developers work, collaborate and deliver value:

• Clarity and consistency: Well-designed APIs act as clear contracts, reducing guesswork and back-and-forth between teams.

• Faster development and onboarding: Developers can start building immediately using documented APIs, mock servers and SDKs without waiting on backend implementations.

• Parallel work across teams: Frontend, backend and partner teams can work independently, accelerating delivery and reducing bottlenecks.

• Reusability and scalability: APIs designed once can be reused across multiple products, channels and services, lowering technical debt.

• Better tooling and automation: API-first enables automated testing, monitoring and CI/CD workflows, improving reliability and developer confidence.

• Foundation for composable architectures: API-first systems make it easy to add, replace or scale components without disrupting the entire platform.

• Accelerated AI adoption and experimentation: API-first architectures make it easier to integrate AI and machine-learning capabilities, such as recommendation engines, search, personalization and generative AI, into existing systems. 

According to the 2025 State of the API Report, 82% of organizations have adopted some level of an API-first approach, with 25% operating as fully API-first organizations, a 12% increase from 2024. 

While this growth is significant from a developer experience point of view, it’s worth noting that the key driver is that APIs generate revenue. The same report revealed that 74% of organizations generate at least 10% of their total revenue from APIs, with nearly 25% deriving more than half their total revenue from API programs. 

What’s more, not only do organizations directly monetize their APIs, but revenue comes through multiple channels that compound over time, such as:

• Improved user experience (54%)

• Reduced engineering overhead (42%). 

• Improved AI readiness (34%). 

There’s no denying that developers already use AI to improve code quality, generate API documentation and accelerate development cycles. The widespread adoption of AI across development cycles, however, has not yet been translated into APIs designed for AI consumption. 

As agentic commerce enters the fold, it’s becoming increasingly critical to: 

• Standardize formats to make information structured and machine-readable. Product details should be expressed in structured schemas and rich attributes, rather than being hidden in PDFs or unstructured text, to ensure discoverability. 

• Standardize promotions and offers also enables AI agents to easily parse, compare and act on them autonomously.

• Expose open APIs that enable agents to access live, trustworthy data on availability, delivery promises and pricing.

In addition, security and scalability become even more important in this new reality due to concerns about unauthorized or excessive API calls from AI agents. This means organizations should ramp up efforts to build APIs with AI in mind, being able to identify agents, enhance monitoring capabilities and invest in scalable solutions to support an increase in traffic.

Finally, as AI agents emerge as “API consumers”, APIs built with machine-readable schemas, consistent patterns and thorough documentation will integrate more quickly and reliably than those designed solely for human use. 

In the era of AI-driven development, the Model Context Protocol (MCP) framework is becoming essential as it provides a structured approach for building, integrating and consuming AI and API-driven systems efficiently.

Agents are already calling your APIs, regardless of whether you have MCP. With only 10% regular adoption, MCP has not yet reached mainstream developer workflows. 

However, as AI adoption accelerates, MCP is poised to become a standard part of developer workflows rather than an optional framework. Here’s what to expect:

• Broader adoption of MCP standards: As AI agents increasingly interact with APIs autonomously, MCP protocols will help enforce consistency, security and context-aware access. Expect more platforms to support MCP natively, making integration smoother across services.

• Shift toward AI-first coding practices: Developers will need to design APIs and applications with agents in mind:

  • Structure data for machine readability.

  • Clearly define model inputs and outputs.

  • Ensure context is accessible, accurate and up-to-date.

• Modular design becomes essential: MCP encourages breaking systems into reusable components. Developers should focus on modularity and interoperability, so models, context providers and protocols can be updated independently without breaking applications.

• Enhanced monitoring and governance: With AI agents making more autonomous calls, developers must implement rate limits, authentication and logging at the protocol level to maintain reliability and security.

Discover in detail how the commercetools platform provides a developer-friendly environment that enables tech teams to thrive. 

1. Well-designed APIs paired with AI-powered documentation   

Over 500 predefined APIs, accompanied by comprehensive documentation, form the foundation for an exceptional developer experience with commercetools. Our APIs are well-designed, open and extensible, so developers can tailor functionalities with ease. A wide range of SDKs and tools also accelerate integration and delivery. 

For our customers to master our products, it’s critical to provide not only an understanding of individual concepts (like our Carts API) but also to synthesize a complete solution (like creating a full checkout flow). That’s why we integrated AI into our documentation, enabling you to get a fuller picture of our platform and to find best practices more easily. 

Our AI Assistant is an intelligent, context-aware assistant embedded in our documentation and learning experiences. It can: 

• Answer your questions, explain concepts and generate examples. 

• Guide users through complex workflows using trusted, up-to-date knowledge. 

• Remove friction from learning and problem-solving.

Here’s an overview of how it works: 

2. Agentic-ready infrastructure

At commercetools, integrating LLMs, securing APIs, managing data flows and enforcing compliance are pre-engineered and production-ready, allowing AI agents to reason, decide and act in real time — in a matter of weeks.

In addition, you can design, deploy and monitor AI agents in a fully secure environment without the infrastructure burden of managing hosting, scaling or compliance. 

Our MCP capabilities are available in two variants, each designed for different use cases:

• Commerce MCP is an AI agent interface for commercetools functionality, including Merchant Center capabilities, Payment Hub and order management. It enables SaaS applications that are prebuilt with commercetools capabilities, supporting AI-powered assistants and autonomous commerce agents.

• Developer MCP makes developer documentation and APIs accessible to IDEs, automation tools and AI assistants. It reduces developer ramp-up time, accelerates delivery and supports AI-assisted development workflows. Developer MCP can be used free of charge. 

3. Extensibility 

commercetools provides out-of-the-box data structures and behavior that cover the needs of modern commerce solutions. However, your project may have unique requirements that require these data structures and behaviors to be extended.

This is where API extensibility comes in. This design approach enables platforms to continuously expand from their out-of-the-box features, utilizing them in new ways and configurations. In short, it’s possible to use an existing functionality as the foundation and build upon it, allowing businesses to meet their needs more easily and quickly. 

At commercetools, extensibility enables developers to modify, add and extend 500+ APIs to behave according to business specifications, from adding fields to existing resources to implementing new workflows. These customization options available at commercetools are Types, Custom Fields, Custom Objects, API Extensions, Subscriptions and States. 

4. Leveraging GraphQL 

The API-first commercetools platform comes with full GraphQL coverage. Unlike traditional REST APIs, GraphQL enables developers to specify exactly what data they need, reducing the over-fetching and under-fetching of data in your API. 

A digital commerce platform that provides GraphQL capabilities enhances developer experiences because it’s straightforward to add new types and fields to an API, helping developers design, develop and deploy features quickly.

5. Tech-agnostic approach 

The API-based platform commercetools champions wouldn’t be complete without a tech-agnostic approach. Developers aren’t required to code in specific programming languages or be certified in proprietary technologies with commercetools. 

This freedom in engineering opens the doors for tech teams to select the tools that best suit their needs and increase productivity. 

6. Store Launchpads

Store Launchpads provide a set of frontend components and integrations built to showcase the features and functionality of commercetools Frontend. It provides everything out-of-the-box to help retailers launch a new frontend quickly and acts as an accelerator by providing documentation, tutorials and best practices to reduce development efforts. 

7. Solution Hub

Integrate best-of-breed solutions easier and faster with accelerators, connectors and/or ready-to-go integrations available on Solution Hub. 

A great benefit for tech professionals is that developers can opt for pre-built and no-code integrators that can be leveraged instantly, or create custom integrators that fit unique environments — and still be deployed in a matter of days/weeks.  

The Vitamin Shoppe: Boosting ROI through faster releases

The health and wellness retailer, The Vitamin Shoppe, can now deliver on high-ROI projects faster and employ advanced deployment strategies, enable scalability for sales events and reduce moments of stress for the development team. 

The platform’s performance has eliminated downtime, enabled faster deployment cycles, and accelerated shopping cart API responses 4X and data processing 10X.

Pet Circle: Built for growth and developers’ productivity

The Australian pet brand tapped into an API-first platform for checkout, cart, orders, product catalog and customer details, freeing up internal engineering teams to build what sets the company apart.  

The retailer can now deliver richer online experiences — personalization, recurring orders and better product discovery — powered by an innovation engine that deploys in about three minutes.

Signing up for our 60-day free trial gives developers a chance to experience what they can build with commercetools without risk. Our complete API catalog, as well as Merchant Center (our business tooling), are available free of charge. You can build a fully functional proof of concept and even an MVP (minimum viable product) during this period. 

After the trial, all your project data is securely stored in the Merchant Center so you can start with commercetools whenever you’re ready. 

Leveraging the power of the commercetools Platform is a game-changer for business and technology leaders, enabling them to achieve great results without the complexity of legacy platforms. We continue to leverage and grow our commitment to the developer community with great APIs, designed to simplify their tasks, enhance their work and infuse it with innovation. 

For developers eager to explore modern tech with commercetools, sign up for the 60-day free trial and discover a developer-friendly environment to experiment, innovate and grow.