Book details
Platform Economies
How AI Is Rewriting the Rules of Platforms, APIs, and Partnerships
Bibliographic record
- Title
- Platform Economies
- Subtitle
- How AI Is Rewriting the Rules of Platforms, APIs, and Partnerships
- Author
- Mohammed Brückner
- ISBN-13
- 979-8-1954-5157-8
- Published
- 1 September 2026
- Publisher
- Independently published
- Pages
- 252 (paperback)
- Language
- English
- Formats
- Paperback and Kindle
- Subjects
- Platform strategy, API management, enterprise architecture, agentic AI
Editions
Also on Amazon UK, Germany, France, Japan and Canada. This link routes to your own marketplace.
What it argues
Platform compression is the collapse of the middle ground between infrastructure owners, platform owners and feature owners. Three rule shifts drive it: efficiency over headcount, value over volume, platforms over features. Three operating models are available in response — the Platform Pivot, the Hybrid AI Play, and the Status-Quo Trap that most organisations are in by default.
The operating engine is the APIOps Cycle: five lines and twenty-seven stages, with a maturity model, a readiness checklist and a transformation roadmap. Cases are drawn from Microsoft, Cloudflare, Grammarly, Spotify and SAP.
Contents
- Part I — Foundations
- 1. Foundations — What I Used to Believe
- 2. What Held Up
- 3. What Changed — The Compression
- 4. What I Didn't See Coming
- Part II — The New Rules
- 5. Platforms Make All the Rules
- 6. Three Patterns Driving Compression
- Part III — The Strategic Choice
- 7. The Stalling Leverage Engine
- 8. Model 1: The Platform Pivot
- 9. Model 2: The Hybrid AI Play
- 10. Model 3: The Status-Quo Trap
- 11. Is There a Fourth Option?
- Part IV — The Operating Engine
- 12. From CI/CD to APIOps
- 13. The Five Lines of the APIOps Cycle
- 14. Maturity and Measurement
- 15. Agentic AI in the APIOps Cycle
- Part V — The Hyperscaler Lens
- 16. Microsoft: Workforce Compression as Platform Strategy
- 17. Cloudflare: From Infrastructure to Data Marketplace
- 18. Grammarly: From Feature to Platform (or Bust)
- 18a. Spotify: The Platform Pivot at Scale
- 18b. SAP: Industrial Compression
- Part VI — Building Your Platform Economy
- 19. Reading the Signals
- 20. The Platform Economy Playbook
- 21. The API-First Transformation Roadmap
- 22. Agentic AI Readiness Checklist
- 23. Conclusion: The Next Decade of Platform Economies
Not to be confused with
"Platform economies" is also a general term in academic and policy writing. This book is not the Platform Economies Research Network, and it is not Marc Steinberg's The Platform Economy, Belleflamme and Peitz's The Economics of Platforms, Codagnone, Karatzogianni and Matthews' Platform Economics, or Parker, Van Alstyne and Choudary's Platform Revolution. It is a 2026 title by a practising enterprise architect, and the ISBN above is the way to be sure you have the right one.
About the author
Mohammed Brückner is an enterprise architect based in Munich, with two decades in IT strategy, enterprise architecture and digital transformation across global organisations. He also wrote IT's not magic, it's architecture, Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) with Databricks on Azure End-To-End and The Office Adventure Digital Transformation Quest, and hosts the podcast The Platform Economist. More at mohammed-brueckner.com.