How Tata Consultancy Services cut API design time by 88% with SmartBear Swagger

Overview

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), a global leader in IT services and consulting, needed a faster, more scalable way to design, modernize, and govern APIs for a major airline client. Managing APIs supporting booking systems, loyalty programs, seat pricing, and ancillary services had become increasingly complex due to fragmented legacy specifications and inconsistent development practices. By adopting SmartBear Swagger with AI-assisted workflows, TCS accelerated API design, improved governance, and modernized its API ecosystem while increasing collaboration across engineering and business teams

Approach

• Embedded SmartBear AI into API design, validation, and governance workflows
• Accelerated API specification creation for complex airline pricing and booking services
• Modernized legacy OpenAPI specifications by consolidating duplicate schemas and converting outdated YAML to OpenAPI 3.1
• Standardized naming conventions and validation to improve API governance
• Used AI-powered schema compatibility checks to detect breaking changes before production

Benefits

Using SmartBear Swagger, TCS dramatically reduced the time required to design APIs—from 1.5 days to under three hours—allowing engineering teams to spend less time on repetitive specification work and more time delivering business value. AI-assisted governance improved API consistency by reducing schema duplication by approximately 40%, simplifying maintenance and validation across distributed teams. The organization also modernized legacy API specifications, strengthened governance through standardized validation workflows, and reduced operational risk by identifying incompatible schema changes before deployment. Together, these improvements enabled faster delivery, higher-quality APIs, and a more scalable foundation for enterprise API development.