Organizations are increasingly turning to digital transformation to enhance efficiency, control costs, and improve customer experiences, especially in unpredictable economic climates. Transitioning from legacy systems to modern cloud-native, microservices-based architectures offers benefits such as agility and scalability but also introduces challenges like managing complexity and increased API volumes. API automation proves crucial in this context by automating the API lifecycle, which minimizes manual interventions, reduces errors, and accelerates development cycles, ensuring consistency and seamless integration. The approach streamlines workflows, enforces standards, and provides centralized control while enhancing observability and analytics. By adopting best practices in API automation, businesses can optimize efficiency, maintain compliance, and unlock innovation. They shift developers' focus from tedious tasks to adding business value, facilitated by technologies like API gateways and APIOps, which centralize API management and foster a federated model that balances flexibility with organizational standards. This holistic approach to modernization ensures applications are agile, scalable, and resilient, ultimately delivering long-term business value.