API + AI Summit launch recap: Every agent has a connectivity journey. Konnect now governs all of it. #
Standing up a production agent means taking it through six stages:
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React: the agent must be able to react to events as they occur internal or external to the business
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Discover: Once running, can the agent find what it needs? This means MCP Servers, tools, skills, models, APIs, events, and other agents
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Get credentialed: can the agent (safely) get credentialed to access enterprise intelligence and context stores?
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Consume context–efficinetly: MCP is the defacto context integration layer; but can Agents leverage it without being overloaded with costly, inaccurate context?
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Pay for itself: every agentic workflow burns tokens, and tokens cost money; how can organizations ensure that agents are creating more value than they are spending?
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Be understood: the entire journey must be queryable, traceable, and debuggable
At API & AI Summit, we announced the evolution of Kong Konnect into the AI Connectivity Platform and announced a slate of launches built around that idea. Here's what we launched, where each piece fits, and what you can use today.
The launches, stage by stage #
1. React to the world: Webhook Engine (private beta)
An agent that only runs when a person prompts it isn't autonomous. Real autonomy starts when something happens in the world, like a payment failing or a ticket opening, and the agent responds. Webhook Engine joins Event Gateway in Event Management to let teams invoke agents reactively from external events, with the same governance as the rest of their traffic.
2. Find what it needs: Agent & MCP Registry (coming soon) and Konnect Catalog (GA)
An agent needs to discover the MCP servers, tools, models, and other agents it is sanctioned to use, and nothing it isn't. The Agent & MCP Registry, part of AI Management, will give agents that governed list. Konnect Catalog, generally available today, is the platform-wide system of record for people: the place teams go to see every model, registry, API, and event stream across the organization.
3. Get credentialed: Token Vault (coming soon)
Agents need access to sensitive systems, and handing them long-lived credentials is how access sprawl starts. Token Vault is designed so agents can reach the systems they need without holding credentials of their own. It builds on Kong Identity as the shared machine identity layer.
4. Consume context the right way: Context Mesh (GA)
Wrapping an existing API as an MCP server is easy. Producing an MCP server an agent can actually use well takes more work. Context Mesh, now generally available, turns existing APIs into well-designed MCP servers, built on code mode, so agents consume governed tools and context instead of raw endpoints.
5. Pay for itself: AI cost management (early access)
AI spend grows faster than anyone's ability to explain it. AI cost management, built on Konnect Metering and Billing, attributes agent and model spend so teams can defend it to finance, and lays the groundwork to eventually monetize it. It is available now to early access design partners.
6. Be understood: Advanced AI Observability (early access)
When an agent goes wrong on turn seven of a conversation, request-level logs won't tell you why. Advanced AI Observability traces the whole conversation and lets teams debug it live. It is available now to early access design partners.
Build it wherever you want: strategic portability #
Everything above has to run where your agents actually run. For most enterprises, that is several places at once, and the mix will keep changing.
So we don't ask you to pick one. Run agents in AWS, GCP, or Azure. Run them on-prem or at the edge. Provision models in your data platform, or self-host open-weight models. We think a heterogeneous estate is the right enterprise architecture, and we built Konnect to make it governable.
We call this strategic portability. Many AI gateways and data platforms govern well inside their own environment and make everything outside it harder. Konnect is designed to apply one governance model across all of it, which also gives teams a practical answer on sovereignty, data residency, and lock-in.
Get started #
Agents reach production when the path from trigger to invoice is governed end to end. Konnect is built to give teams that path on one platform, across every environment they run.
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We're thrilled to announce that Kong, the AI connectivity company, has been recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for API Management for the seventh year in a row. Plus, Kong was positioned furthest on the Completeness of Vision axis
Kong
This post is based on Kong's webinar on token cost management. Watch it below, or keep reading for the breakdown. Token cost management is how a business tracks, controls, and governs what it spends on AI model usage, the same way it already track
Kong
Multi-agent workflows live and die on context. Every agent-to-agent call and every agent-to-tool call is either a retrieval — fetching information the agent needs — or a mutation — changing state that downstream agents will depend on. At prototype s
Hugo Guerrero
Multi-agent systems are, at their core, context distribution systems. Every agent in your workflow is a consumer and producer of context. The interesting architectural questions are all about how that context moves. Two operations drive everything:
Hugo Guerrero
An AI agent isn't magic. It's a reasoning engine that makes decisions based on what it knows at a given moment. That "what it knows" is its context — the information available to it right now. Context is everything. Give an agent the wrong context,
A decade ago, we set out to connect the world through APIs, which we saw as fundamental building blocks of software. Before Kong, we founded Mashape as the first API marketplace to provide an assembly line for developers building apps, and then we o
Augusto Marietti
So much has changed since our co-founders Augusto "Aghi" Marietti and Marco Palladino first started building a company back in Milan in 2009. We were the API connectivity company. But today, we're the AI connectivity company In order to make
Juliette Rizkallah
We're thrilled to announce that Kong, the AI connectivity company, has been recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for API Management for the seventh year in a row. Plus, Kong was positioned furthest on the Completeness of Vision axis
Kong
This post is based on Kong's webinar on token cost management. Watch it below, or keep reading for the breakdown. Token cost management is how a business tracks, controls, and governs what it spends on AI model usage, the same way it already track
Kong
Multi-agent workflows live and die on context. Every agent-to-agent call and every agent-to-tool call is either a retrieval — fetching information the agent needs — or a mutation — changing state that downstream agents will depend on. At prototype s
Hugo Guerrero
Multi-agent systems are, at their core, context distribution systems. Every agent in your workflow is a consumer and producer of context. The interesting architectural questions are all about how that context moves. Two operations drive everything:
Hugo Guerrero
An AI agent isn't magic. It's a reasoning engine that makes decisions based on what it knows at a given moment. That "what it knows" is its context — the information available to it right now. Context is everything. Give an agent the wrong context,
A decade ago, we set out to connect the world through APIs, which we saw as fundamental building blocks of software. Before Kong, we founded Mashape as the first API marketplace to provide an assembly line for developers building apps, and then we o
Augusto Marietti
So much has changed since our co-founders Augusto "Aghi" Marietti and Marco Palladino first started building a company back in Milan in 2009. We were the API connectivity company. But today, we're the AI connectivity company In order to make
Juliette Rizkallah
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