Startups who are building products these days should strongly consider adding Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Historically, APIs enable other programs to drive a program. This could be developers at other software companies or power users using automation products like Zapier, Make, or IFTT. Large language models (LLM) such as ChatGPT are making API more important.
Text interfaces enable people or other systems to describe the actions they want. This means that each product will have its own LLM to translate English-like requests into API calls. For example, “create a new student named Bruce Lee and enroll him in all sixth-grade classes.” Another example is “create an assignment for Spanish section 1 and assign each group their associated Google Document named unit 4.1.”
In the long run, text interfaces may reduce the need for a large investment in user interfaces. Users will create prompts for the actions they want. Or, collected prompts could automatically reconfigure the user interface so that the most used actions are easier to find and require fewer steps.
