Postman Launches AI Agent Builder, Bridging API Ecosystem with Generative AI

API collaboration startup Postman wants to lead the charge in AI agent development - SiliconANGLE

API collaboration startup Postman wants to lead the charge in AI agent development Postman Inc., the well-funded startup that's recognized as an industry leader in application programming interface development, says it's getting into the business of developing artificial intelligence agents. The company says its new AI Agent Builder tool empowers companies to combine large language models with APIs and workflows to design, test and deploy intelligent AI-powered applications quickly. AI agents are more advanced algorithms that leverage generative AI models to perform complex tasks on behalf of users with minimal supervision. They're one of the hottest trends in AI development right now, and they're something that Postman says it can simplify. The startup explains that it provides centralized access to APIs from more than 18,000 companies, enabling it to feed vast amounts of data to AI agents quickly. Add to that, it offers a no-code modular development environment called Postman Flows and integrated testing. These can all be combined to accelerate the AI agent development process, the company says. Postman provides collaboration tools that help companies build APIs, which are the main channels through which applications interact with one another. They're used to transfer information, for example when an analytics tool needs to access records from a database, to provision cloud infrastructure and automate business tasks. The company believes the emergence of agentic AI will bring about a shift in the way new software is developed and operated, citing data from Deloitte Touche Ltd., which suggests half of all companies will have some kind of AI agent up and running by 2027. According to Postman, this shift is analogous to the rise of mobile applications. Initially, the first mobile apps were all quite simple and disconnected from broader services. But over time, those apps became tightly integrated with cloud services, transforming their utility and helping to make smartphones a tool that few can live without. Postman thinks agentic AI has the same potential to transform organizational productivity, and that explains why it wants to play a role in its development. It adds that combining AI services with an API-driven architecture will lead to more adaptive automations that can better understand context, make decisions for users and solve problems dynamically. Postman says its AI Agent Builder can help to make all of this achievable, and sees it becoming a standardized way for companies to build, test and deploy AI agents in one location. Most importantly, it provides developers with a centralized platform for large language model and API discovery, so they can easily search for and integrate two of the key components of AI agents at their fingertips. Users can select from more than 18,000 verified APIs within its catalog, or build their own private APIs using the Postman platform. It also integrates with the Postman Collection Runner Client and Flows tools for developers to test LLM responses, prompts and inputs. The Postman Flows tool acts as a visual canvas for AI agent building, eliminating the coding tasks required for API integration. What's more, Postman says, its APIs are all ready to use out of the box, so there's no need to rewrite any boilerplate code to integrate them with the developer's preferred development environment. Postman founder and Chief Executive Abhinav Asthana says APIs are already one of the foundational building blocks for generative AI software applications. "As AI agents gain traction, we could see a 10- to 100-times increase in API utility, enabling software systems to execute increasingly complex workflows," he insisted. "Eventually humans will have the option to remove themselves or hand off certain workflows, allowing agents to automate processes -- so long as the agents are built with the proper guardrails."

Postman launches an AI agent builder on top of its API platform

Since it was founded in 2014, India-based Postman has made a name for itself as one of the most popular platforms for building and using APIs, with 500,000 organizations now using the service. Like with so many other SaaS services, though, its valuation today is reportedly down from its $5.6 billion high in 2021. But the company is now jumping head-first into the AI space with the launch of an AI agent builder that combines large language models and the Postman API platform, as well as a visual editor that brings the two together to help even non-developers build and test AI agents. At first, jumping into AI agents may seem like an odd choice for a company like Postman, but as Postman CEO and co-founder Abhinav Asthana noted when I talked to him ahead of the agent builder's launch, to be useful, these agents have to interact with a wide variety of services -- and the way to do that is through APIs. "Our customers actually started asking us about this. 'Okay, this agent thing is kind of coming up. What are you guys doing about it?' And we looked at the patterns in which they are stringing this together. Whether they're using homegrown systems or they're using some third-party stuff, APIs are a key part of it, because there are two kinds of APIs: one is the LLM itself, like the OpenAI API, or the Anthropic's API, or maybe a homegrown API. And the second bit are tools the agent would use. So we were like, okay, Postman is helping developers do all things APIs and if this is emerging as a pattern, we should do something here," explained Asthana. He also noted that a growing number of Postman users are non-developers, who want to use the service for building simple, API-centric applications. "So when AI technology started emerging, we had to test it out a lot. We saw like, 'okay, can this be used?' And it looks like no-code, plus AI, plus agents is a good combo to bring together," Asthana said. Postman's API network already features an API hub with contributions from over 18,000 companies, which now, in turn, also allows its users to build AI agents that can interact with these APIs. To ensure that these agents work as expected, Postman is adding testing and evaluation tools to the service to test prompts and inputs for the models it supports (think OpenAI, Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, Cohere and Meta's Llama, for example). It then allows users to use Postman Flows, the company's visual development environment, to build these agents and have them interact with APIs. Right now, Postman's AI agents are mostly focused on enabling back-end operations. While developers could use the service to power front-end services, Postman itself doesn't offer any user interface for directly interacting with these agents yet. Over time, this may change. "We are all very bullish on agent software, but I think the modalities in which we interact with these systems is also going to evolve," Asthana said. Postman, of course, is not the only company in this space, but on top of having its existing API hub, Asthana also believes that it can differentiate its service from others -- and especially the large cloud providers -- by offering a better developer experience. "In my opinion, the cloud providers always prioritize consumption of the cloud over developer experience, and I think they're willing to partner with anyone who does actually give the right developer experience," he said. The company is still figuring out how to best charge for this new service. Pricing, Asthana said, will evolve over time as the team works out how to best determine the value that these agents bring.