Your question is Explain APIs for Data Pipelines. Take a moment with it on the right.
Talk me through your thinking if you like. When you're confident, submit your answer and I'll grade it like a real screen (7/10 or better passes).
You're talking to a business user who wants data from a web service to flow into an analytics workflow. They do not need protocol-level detail, but they do need a practical explanation of how the data gets requested, loaded, and checked inside a pipeline.
How would you explain an API to a business user who wants to pull data from a web service?