Pooja Vijay Kumar

About the talk

"Documentation is shifting left—but not in the way we expected. In 2025, specs are the documentation. As AI agents begin to interpret and act on APIs autonomously, the OpenAPI spec is no longer a backend formality—it’s the first point of contact, the contract, and increasingly, the interface.

In this talk, I’ll share what it means to treat OpenAPI like user-facing documentation—from syntax choices to semantic intent—and how doing so unlocks new affordances for agentic AI.

Drawing on real examples from platform ecosystems and AI-integrated workflows, we’ll cover:

1. Making specs semantically expressive: How descriptions, examples, and constraints can serve both LLMs and humans in context.
2. Surfacing specs through AI interfaces: What happens when your chatbot, not your homepage, is your primary API portal.
3. Legacy uplift: Turning brittle specs into structured affordances for discoverability, chaining, and error recovery.
4. Specs as conversation starters: Why your future documentation workflow starts in Stoplight and ends in prompt design.

Expect takeaways on how to treat OpenAPI not just as a dev tool, but as a durable artifact of interaction design for humans and machines alike. If docs are becoming data, specs are where the story starts."

About the speaker

Pooja leads the platform content design practice at Autodesk, where she works at the intersection of APIs, AI, and platform experience. Known for turning complex systems into clear, usable, and human interfaces, she’s built zero-to-one content ecosystems across fintech, enterprise tools, and AI-integrated platforms.

Pooja loves exploring the future of content as infrastructure—how specs, interfaces, and agents are reshaping the way we build and communicate software, and has a sharp eye for what’s emerging just over the horizon. When she's not obsessing over words, she’s mentoring creatives, speaking on the future of AI ethics, or trail walking to EDM beats in the Bay Area.