Over the past few years, many organizations have made significant progress in API management.

Centralized catalogs, technical documentation, defined lifecycles, clear ownership: today, at least on paper, the API ecosystem appears more structured and governable than in the past.

And yet, those who work with APIs on a daily basis know that something still doesn’t add up.

Despite all these tools, onboarding remains complex, reuse often falls short of expectations, and it is not uncommon to discover duplicated or underutilized APIs. The issue, however, is not (only) technological. It is a matter of perspective.

Most catalogs today are API-oriented: they list available APIs and explain how to use them.

But knowing that an API exists and how to call it does not necessarily mean understanding when to use it, in which context it makes sense, and why it should be preferred over others.

This is where the limits of a purely API-oriented approach become apparent.

APIs are treated as isolated technical objects, while in reality they are part of a broader ecosystem, where value emerges from their combination to solve real problems. From this realization comes the need to shift perspective: no longer an API-centric catalog, but a use case-oriented model.

This is not about adding “more” documentation, but about changing the very way an API ecosystem is governed and made understandable.

The Limits of an API-Oriented Catalog

An API-oriented catalog is extremely effective at describing components.

Each API has its own space, its own documentation, its own technical specifications. The problem arises when you move from listing components to addressing a real need.

In practice, the problems applications need to solve rarely map to the use of a single API. More often, they require a composition of APIs, to be used in a specific sequence, with dependencies, preconditions, and constraints that are not evident when looking at APIs one by one.

A simple example helps clarify the point.

Imagine you want to “make some coffee.” An API-oriented catalog would allow you to easily find the individual instructions: grind the coffee, prepare the coffee maker, heat the water, pour the coffee. All useful information, but fragmented. What’s missing is the overall picture: the complete sequence of actions and the conditions required for the final result to actually be achieved. Searching for “grind the coffee” or “prepare the coffee maker” is not the same as searching for “make a coffee.” In the first case, you’re exploring isolated capabilities; in the second, you’re looking for an objective, an outcome.

Translated into the API world, the limitation becomes clear. An API-oriented catalog helps you understand what a single API does, but it doesn’t help you understand how the API ecosystem addresses a concrete need. The value lies not in individual calls, but in their orchestration.

It is precisely this disconnect between technical components and usage objectives that makes the ecosystem difficult to understand, govern, and reuse. To overcome it, a different level of abstraction is required—one that puts the purpose of use, rather than the API itself, at the center.

The Shift: Use Cases as a First-Class Citizens of Governance

To overcome the limits of a purely API-oriented approach, a new level of abstraction must be introduced into governance: the use case.

Talking about use cases in this context does not mean adding documentation or duplicating information already present in technical specifications. It means shifting the focus from what an API does to why it exists and in which context it makes sense to use it—especially in relation to other APIs in the ecosystem. This is the same perspective shift that leads to treating APIs as digital products, evaluated not only for their features, but for the value they generate when used to achieve a concrete goal.

The use case thus becomes a true first-class citizen of governance. It is the element that connects application needs to available APIs, making explicit the logic by which multiple APIs must be used together to achieve an objective. In this model, APIs remain fundamental, but they are no longer the starting point: they are the building blocks that compose a broader outcome.

Adopting a use case-oriented governance model brings tangible benefits. It reduces duplication, because it makes it immediately visible whether a given need is already covered. It promotes reuse, by clarifying the scenarios an API was designed for. It improves onboarding, because newcomers to the ecosystem no longer have to mentally reconstruct how APIs should be combined—they can start from clearly defined objectives.

In this context, the existence of a standard such as Arazzo represents a natural evolution. It does not introduce the concept of use cases, but provides a shared language to describe them in a structured and consistent way, making explicit the relationships between APIs, usage sequences, and the context in which they make sense. It is the missing piece that turns this vision into something not only clear, but also uniform and scalable.

The use case, therefore, is not a theoretical abstraction, but the point where governance, understanding, and operations converge. It is how an API ecosystem stops being a collection of interfaces and starts behaving like a system designed to solve real problems.

A Consolidated Approach to Use Case Governance

Treating use cases as a central element of governance is not a reaction to a recent trend, but an approach that naturally consolidates over time as an API ecosystem grows and becomes more complex.

At ApiShare, the use case has always been the link between applications and APIs. Not as an abstract concept, but as a concrete way to make explicit why an application uses one or more APIs and in which context those APIs generate value. This has made it possible to maintain a clear view of the ecosystem over time, even as the number of APIs, products, and consumers increases.

An approach like this allows the ecosystem to be governed starting from a limited set of functional objectives, rather than from a multitude of technical interfaces. APIs remain autonomous, with their own ownership and lifecycle, but they gain meaning within explicit, shared, and easily explorable use cases.

Introducing a standard formalism to describe these use cases further strengthens this model. Standardization does not mean rigidity, but coherence: clarifying relationships between APIs, making usage sequences understandable and portable, and enabling anyone—technical, product, or platform teams—to read the ecosystem through the same interpretative lens.

In this sense, the use case is not an additional layer, but a structural element of governance. It is what enables the transition from a management approach focused on individual APIs to a truly systemic view, where the value of the ecosystem is immediately readable and governable as a whole.

Toward AI-Ready API Governance

In recent years, we have been witnessing a profound shift in how APIs are used. They are no longer just tools invoked by developers, but increasingly components activated automatically by intelligent systems, agents, and AI-driven workflows.

In this scenario, the problem of understanding becomes even more critical. An AI can technically call an API, but it cannot infer the context in which it should be used, nor reliably reconstruct a sequence of calls from fragmented information. Without a clear description of the “why” and the “when,” orchestration becomes an exercise in trial and error rather than a deterministic process.

A use case-oriented approach, supported by a standard language, directly addresses this need. Making objectives, sequences, and relationships between APIs explicit reduces ambiguity, increases reliability, and prepares the ecosystem to be used not only by people, but also by automated systems.

In other words, the challenge is not to make APIs more powerful, but to make them more understandable. Because if today an API ecosystem cannot clearly explain to a human when and why its APIs should be used, it can hardly expect an AI to do so on its behalf.

Rethinking governance through a use case-oriented lens is therefore not a theoretical exercise, but a necessary step toward building API ecosystems that are truly ready for the future.