Kong Launches Ascent to Eliminate Legacy API Migration Risk and Help Enterprises Get Agentic AI-Ready

Ascent helps enterprises cut legacy API management migration timelines by at least 50%

SAN FRANCISCO, June 8, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Kong Inc., a leading developer of API and AI connectivity technologies, today announced Kong Ascent, a new AI-assisted migration offering designed to help enterprises make their APIs AI-ready. By automating and accelerating the transition from legacy API management platforms to Kong Konnect, the unified API and AI platform, Ascent allows enterprises to cut typical migration timelines by 50% or more.

AI agents are rapidly emerging as a new class of API consumer alongside applications and human developers. To adapt, organizations need an API platform capable of transforming traditional APIs into agent-consumable interfaces. This shift requires infrastructure that can secure agent access, provide deep visibility into agent activity, and tightly control the costs of agentic workflows.

Because legacy API management platforms were designed primarily for human developers and application-to-application integrations they generally lack native support for capabilities such as Model Context Protocol (MCP), AI-specific governance, agent observability, semantic controls, and AI traffic management. As a result, many enterprises face a growing gap between their AI ambitions and the capabilities of the infrastructure running their APIs.

While the need to modernize is clear, the perceived risk of migration has historically been a hurdle. Multi-year timelines, massive consulting bills and unpredictable cutover risks meant that staying on outdated infrastructure was less painful than trying to leave it.

Kong Ascent eliminates this dilemma. By introducing AI automation into the migration lifecycle, backed by human support from Kong Professional Services, Ascent fast-tracks the transition to Kong Konnect. This allows organizations to seamlessly move off legacy systems and onto a unified platform built for API, AI, event and agent connectivity, effectively closing the gap between AI strategy and infrastructure reality.

"Every enterprise software vendor is racing to make their platforms accessible to AI agents," said Reza Shafii, SVP of Product, Kong. "The challenge for most organizations is that the APIs powering their business were never designed to be discovered, governed, secured, and consumed by agents. Kong gives customers the platform they need to make their APIs agent-ready, and Ascent dramatically accelerates the journey."

Kong Konnect
With Kong Konnect, organizations can expose APIs to AI agents, govern and secure agent access through AI Gateway, monitor and control AI traffic, publish APIs and AI services through developer and agent-facing catalogs, and apply consistent governance across traditional APIs and AI workloads. Together, these capabilities help enterprises adopt agentic AI while maintaining the security, visibility, and operational control required at scale.

Kong Ascent is available now through Kong Professional Services for migrations from MuleSoft® environments with additional platforms to follow. Transitioning to Kong Konnect, the unified API and AI platform, provides customers with the ability to manage their APIs, events, and agents, in one place, better positioning them as they enter into the agentic AI era.

To learn more about Kong Ascent, visit konghq.com/products/ascent-ai-powered-api-migration.

About Kong Inc.
Kong Inc., a leading developer of API and AI connectivity technologies, 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.