Kong Forges 'AI Connectivity' Path for the Coming Agentic Era

NEW YORK, NY – February 02, 2026 – From a live stream at the New York Stock Exchange, API and AI infrastructure company Kong Inc. today unveiled an ambitious vision it calls "AI Connectivity," aiming to define a new architectural category for how enterprises manage the burgeoning complexity of artificial intelligence. The roadmap seeks to create a unified foundation for connecting, governing, and scaling the disparate components of modern AI—from APIs and models to increasingly autonomous AI agents.

This move positions Kong to address a critical bottleneck for businesses worldwide: moving AI from contained experiments to mission-critical, production-grade systems. As organizations grapple with a tangled web of different AI models, data sources, and software agents, Kong's proposal is to provide a single layer of control to manage the flow of intelligence securely and reliably, tackling the core blockers of speed, cost, and risk.

Defining a New Battleground: 'AI Connectivity'

At the heart of the announcement is the introduction of "AI Connectivity" as a distinct architectural layer. Kong argues that as the industry shifts from connecting services to connecting intelligence, a new approach is required. This layer aims to provide a unified governance and runtime fabric across LLM calls, traditional APIs, event streams, and agent-to-agent communication, offering consistent visibility and policy enforcement.

While Kong is championing the "AI Connectivity" banner, the underlying need is well-documented. The market for AI orchestration platforms is exploding, with some analysts projecting it to grow from under $10 billion in 2024 to over $65 billion by 2034. This surge reflects the immense challenge enterprises face in managing complex AI workflows. Competitors are also moving to address this space; Microsoft, for example, has begun rolling out "AI gateway" capabilities within its Azure API Management platform.

Kong's strategic bet is that a holistic, unified platform offers a superior solution to a piecemeal approach. "As organizations shift from connecting services to connecting intelligence, enterprises need a foundation for how AI systems are built and operated," said Augusto Marietti, CEO and Co-Founder of Kong, in the announcement. "With AI Connectivity, Kong is defining a new vision for how APIs, AI models, and agents can work together in a unified, enterprise-ready architecture."

The Technology Underpinning the Vision

This vision is not merely conceptual; it is being realized through Kong Konnect, the company's unified API and AI platform. The platform has been enhanced with a suite of new capabilities designed to manage the entire AI data path.

A central component is the Kong AI Gateway, which now includes advanced governance for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a standard for how AI models access tools and context. The gateway acts as a sophisticated traffic cop for AI, enabling features like multi-LLM routing that allows companies to switch between providers like OpenAI, Mistral AI, or Google's Vertex AI without re-architecting their applications. It also offers critical security features, such as built-in PII sanitization and protection against prompt injection attacks.

Furthermore, the platform directly addresses the spiraling costs of AI. With features for metering, billing, and semantic caching—which avoids re-processing redundant prompts—Kong Konnect provides tools for enterprises to monitor and optimize their AI spending.

Perhaps the most forward-looking piece of the announcement is the new Kong MCP Registry. This enterprise directory is designed to help companies register, discover, and govern the tools used by their AI agents. By linking these tools back to their underlying API dependencies within a single catalog, Kong aims to give organizations unprecedented visibility and control, helping to eliminate the rise of "shadow AI" where unmanaged AI tools create security and compliance risks.

Taming the 'Agentic Era'

Kong's announcement is explicitly framed around preparing for the "agentic era"—a future where autonomous AI agents perform complex, multi-step tasks with minimal human supervision. These agents, capable of planning, learning, and using other software tools, promise to revolutionize industries but also introduce magnified risks. Without robust guardrails, they could create security vulnerabilities, leak data, or drive up costs uncontrollably.

The need for a robust connectivity and governance layer becomes paramount in this context. "Individual pilots only get you so far in the enterprise," noted James Kaplan, Chief Technology Officer of McKinsey's Technology Practice, who joined the announcement. "Accelerating innovation with AI requires deployment at scale, supported by platforms that leverage enterprise-grade services. Companies need a way to connect and govern APIs, models and tools to use AI securely and efficiently at scale."

This sentiment was echoed by leaders from the forefront of AI model development. "At Mistral AI, our mission is to put AI in everyone's hands," said Lélio Renard Lavaud, VP of Engineering at Mistral AI. He emphasized that putting AI to work at scale is a daily challenge and that partners like Kong are important. "Through their work in AI connectivity, they help reduce friction and siloes - serving the industry more broadly."

By providing a unified layer for discovery, security, and observability, Kong's AI Connectivity architecture is designed to be the foundational infrastructure that allows these powerful agentic systems to operate safely and effectively within an enterprise setting.

A Growing Ecosystem of Support

The presence of senior technologists from Mistral AI and McKinsey, along with mentions of industry voices like Capital One, signals that Kong's vision resonates with key players across the AI, consulting, and enterprise technology landscapes. This early ecosystem of support is critical, as the success of any platform depends on its adoption by both technology creators and large-scale users.

For Kong, its extensive existing customer base, which includes numerous Fortune 500 companies already relying on its API management solutions, provides a fertile ground for introducing these new capabilities. These organizations have already invested in API-first architectures and are now facing the challenge of integrating AI into that same ecosystem. By extending its proven governance model to the world of AI and agents, Kong is making a compelling case that it can be the trusted partner to guide enterprises into this next technological era. The industry will now watch closely to see how quickly this vision of unified AI Connectivity is adopted and whether it becomes the standard for building the intelligent applications of the future.