Kong Expands AI Management to Help Enterprises Govern and Operate Agentic AI

New capabilities for AI discovery, traffic management, identity, credentials, cost management and observability give enterprises greater control over increasingly complex AI environments

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 4, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Kong Inc., the AI Connectivity Company, today announced a major expansion of Kong AI Management in Kong Konnect, the AI Connectivity Platform. The latest updates introduce a more complete way to discover, secure, govern, observe and manage the economics of AI interactions as enterprise architectures move from individual model calls to agent-driven workflows.

With this release, Kong introduces new AI cost management and advanced AI observability capabilities, giving enterprises greater visibility into AI usage, costs and behavior. These are complemented by Kong AI Registry, Kong Token Vault, expanded agent identity capabilities and enhancements to Kong AI Gateway.

Early genAI infrastructure was built around applications sending prompts to LLMs. Agentic AI is more dynamic: a single task can involve multiple models, MCP servers, APIs, tools, enterprise data and other agents, often acting on behalf of a user. Each interaction introduces new considerations around identity, authorization, security, reliability, observability and cost. AI gateways remain an important control point, but enterprises now need visibility and control across the broader network of interactions that power AI systems.

"AI is rapidly introducing connectivity problems for enterprises," said Augusto Marietti, CEO and co-founder, Kong. "An agent creates value when it can securely work with APIs, tools, data, applications and events. Every one of those interactions has to be discovered, authorized, governed, observed and paid for. Kong AI Management brings those concerns together into one connectivity layer, so enterprises can give AI access to what it needs while controlling how it's used."

Kong is expanding AI management across the agentic AI environment with new and expanded capabilities:

• AI Registry: Provides a governed inventory of models, agents, MCP servers, tools and other AI capabilities, helping enterprises define what AI systems can discover and use.
• Kong AI Gateway 2.3: Expands runtime management of AI traffic with new capabilities for model and MCP interactions, policy enforcement and AI cost management.
• Kong Identity: Establishes a consistent identity for humans, applications and agents, including interactions performed on behalf of users, helping organizations understand who or what is acting across AI and API traffic and apply identity-based authorization.
• Kong Token Vault: Brokers authorized downstream credentials at runtime rather than requiring agents to hold them directly, helping reduce credential proliferation across AI applications while supporting identity-based authorization and policy enforcement.
• AI Cost Management: Connects AI usage and associated costs to the teams, users, applications, agents and business activities responsible for consumption. Organizations can establish budgets, track usage, support showback and chargeback, and identify opportunities to reduce costs through supported optimization techniques such as caching, compression, reasoning controls and intelligent model routing. Savings measurement helps teams understand the financial impact of those optimizations.
• Advanced AI Observability: Provides visibility across complete AI sessions and interactions, allowing teams to follow activity across models, tools, agents, MCP interactions and policies and investigate individual turns for behavior, latency, errors and cost.
• Kong Konnect: Brings AI management capabilities together in a common control plane for configuration, governance, analytics and operational visibility, connecting what organizations learn from AI usage and performance to decisions about policy, routing and optimization.

Kong AI Management brings these capabilities together in one control plane for configuration, governance, analytics and operational visibility, extending Kong's history of managing the connections between applications and services into the agentic enterprise.

You can learn more about the latest capabilities available in Kong Konnect, here.

About Kong Inc.

Kong Inc., the AI Connectivity Company, is building the connectivity layer of AI. Trusted by the Fortune 500® and AI-native startups alike, Kong's unified API and AI platform enables organizations to secure, manage, accelerate, govern, and monetize the flow of intelligence across APIs and AI traffic — on any model, any cloud. For more information, visit www.konghq.com.

SOURCE Kong Inc.