Kong to Unveil AI Connectivity Vision and Roadmap to Power the Agentic Era

Kong will introduce a new architectural approach for connecting, governing, and scaling intelligence across APIs, AI models, and agents

NEW YORK, Feb. 2, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Kong Inc., a leading developer of API and AI connectivity technologies, today will unveil its AI Connectivity vision and roadmap, defining a new category for how enterprises connect, govern, and scale intelligence across APIs, AI models, and agent-based systems. During a live stream from the New York Stock Exchange later today, the company plans to outline how organizations can operationalize AI using the same enterprise grade principles that have helped power mission critical APIs for over a decade. Additionally, Kong will discuss how AI Connectivity can establish a unified governance and runtime layer across APIs, events, LLM calls, MCP connections, and agent to agent communication, providing consistent visibility, control, and policy enforcement across the agentic stack.

As enterprises move from experimenting to putting advanced AI into production, they face growing complexity across models, tools, data sources, real time streams, and autonomous agents. AI Connectivity represents Kong's architectural approach to unifying the full AI data path across these systems, helping ensure that intelligence can flow securely and reliably, while addressing three core blockers to scaling AI in production: speed, cost, and risk.

"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. "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 that enables companies to scale AI safely, cost effectively, and with confidence."

Kong's AI Connectivity roadmap can be realized through Kong Konnect, the only unified API and AI Connectivity platform. This includes recent releases of advanced MCP governance in the Kong AI Gateway, MCP testing in Insomnia, AI cost governance and monetization in Konnect Metering & Billing, and KAi: the agentic API platform assistant in Konnect . Taken together, these products and capabilities are designed to help organizations manage the full AI data path, from LLM traffic routing and governance to secure agent tool discovery, real time streaming, and enterprise-wide observability.

As part of our AI Connectivity roadmap, we are also announcing Kong's MCP Registry, a new capability within Kong Konnect's API Service Catalog that is designed to help enterprises register, dynamically discover, and govern MCP servers and tools used by AI agents. 

Accelerating AI while reducing risk and cost
AI Connectivity is designed to help enterprises move from experimentation to production by addressing the core operational barriers to scaling AI. With Kong's AI Connectivity architecture, organizations can:

• Significantly accelerate time to market by unifying connectivity across APIs, models, agents, and tools, reducing integration friction and enabling faster deployment of agentic systems
• Reduce operational and compliance risk through centralized governance, policy enforcement, and visibility across the full AI data path, helping eliminate shadow AI and support regulatory requirements
• Control and optimize AI costs with end-to-end observability into model usage, token consumption, and API traffic, enabling teams to identify inefficiencies and manage spend with confidence
• Improve reliability and performance by routing and governing AI traffic through a unified connectivity layer that minimizes latency and supports real time, agent driven workloads at scale

Kong's live stream today will be led by Augusto Marietti, CEO and Co-Founder of Kong, Marco Palladino, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Kong, and Reza Shafii, SVP of Product Management at Kong. The leadership team will outline the company's AI Connectivity roadmap and how enterprises can prepare for the next phase of AI driven architecture. 

They will be joined by technical leaders from organizations including Lélio Renard Lavaud, VP of Engineering at Mistral AI and James Kaplan, CTO of McKinsey Technology, who will share their perspectives on what makes companies successful in capturing AI's value, how they see AI connectivity emerging in the industry, and more.

"At Mistral AI, our mission is to put AI in everyone's hands. We're focused on building the full stack - from the models to applications to compute. Putting AI to work at scale is critical to our day to day, and that's one of the reasons why partners like Kong are important," said Lélio Renard Lavaud, VP of Engineering at Mistral AI. "Through their work in AI connectivity, they help reduce friction and siloes - serving the industry more broadly."

"Individual pilots only get you so far in the enterprise. 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," said James Kaplan, Chief Technology Officer, McKinsey Technology Practice.

About Kong

Kong Inc., a leading developer of API and AI connectivity technologies, is building the infrastructure that powers the agentic era. Trusted by the Fortune 500 and startups alike, Kong's unified API and AI platform, Kong Konnect, enables organizations to secure, manage, accelerate, govern, and monetize the flow of intelligence across APIs and AI models. For more information, visit www.konghq.com.

SOURCE Kong Inc.