Feel free to ask questions :)

Vendors will likely shift to charging for the actual value they deliver rather than billing per API call.

Over time, I see public API usage dropping off, but total API usage skyrocketing – as these agents will make a ton of calls behind the scenes. MCPs are still in a technical adoption phase, but they will evolve with more user‑friendly experiences.

So their plan is to restrict API access and push official “A2A agents,” selling them as virtual employees. In the future, you might just visit some developer portal and rent as many virtual workers as you want, each capable of parallel tasks, etc.

Why would they do that? Because most SaaS vendors want total control over their products and how they’re used. With these “shadow” MCP integrations, they lose the ability to track usage or enforce pricing.

We’re also seeing major companies sign up for this kind of format, because it preserves their revenue streams. I fully expect more vendors to limit or even block their existing APIs, raise prices, or make them available only through premium tiers. (Twitter did quite long time ago.)

Google’s new A2A protocol helps address this issue. From a pure technology angle, I like it. You can schedule tasks, define “skills,” and basically treat these agents like virtual employees. It’s probably the direction the industry is heading.

Now, with MCP and agentic stuff, you can deliver an experience so good it might actually beat the vendor’s own UI. That’s alarming for SaaS providers because you basically get 90 % of the value at 10 % of the price – and they lose control.

Historically, API usage wasn’t a big threat, because sure, you could export data, crunch numbers, or build some custom scripts, but replicating a polished user interface or full product experience was too much hassle.

Think about it: why pay for an extra seat on a SaaS platform – like Zendesk – if you can just integrate its API into your chatbot and let everyone in your team access it? Vendors often can’t even tell if your requests are coming from AI or human users.

First of all, the recent agent‑to‑agent (A2A) protocol that Google introduced isn’t really some massive tech breakthrough in itself. It’s more like an attempt to fix the very shaky SaaS economy, which is getting hammered by “shadow API usage.”

These questions about training, career progression, and future engineering roles are crucial. Even without clear answers, they're important conversations to explore.

With advanced AI tools, anyone in a company—not just product managers but people in virtually any role—could handle tasks traditionally done by coding juniors. Does it then still make sense to hire dedicated coding juniors?