Augusto Marietti
CEO & Co-Founder of Kong
This content contains a video which can not be displayed in Agent mode
That's a wrap on API + AI Summit 2026, Kong's biggest in-person event yet.
Our ninth annual event brought together more than 1,000 engineers, architects, and leaders in Los Angeles to discuss running AI systems in production, tackle shared architecture challenges, and swap real-world insights.
Across the two-day event, we were joined on stage by leaders and builders from Accenture, Gartner, NVIDIA, FanDuel, Ericsson, Prudential, Dell, EROAD, Siemens Energy, Poly AI, Santander TSB, and more.
Helping the world move AI #
Some ask if AI is moving too fast. The real question is: are you ready?
And Kong Konnect is the AI connectivity platform. Our API heritage makes us uniquely qualified to build from the ground up the unified control plane where APIs, models, and agents connect. Managing APIs was the old job, and moving AI is the new one.
Platform teams have a new name today: AI movers.
Kong is the ideal platform for moving AI. And the builders, teams, and organizations using Kong are the right people to do it. With Kong, they can move AI safely, economically, efficiently, and reliably.
Volcano erupts with AI infrastructure for agents and apps #
On day 1 of Summit, Marco Palladino, Kong CTO and Co-Founder, debuted Volcano. This new product provides the AI stack for building AI agents and applications at scale, including branchable Postgres databases, durable functions, frontend hosting, authentication, file storage, and distributed locks.
You can use Volcano standalone or in combination with Kong Konnect to govern, secure, and discover AI agents (and APIs, MCP tools, and LLMs) at scale.
- Registry & Catalog — The Agent & MCP Registry is where agents discover and subscribe to what they're sanctioned to use. Kong CatalogKong Catalog (formerly Kong Service Catalog) is where humans keep a governed inventory of everything running. Together they are Kong's AI-native discovery surface.
For teams building AI and agentic architecture, we believe this year's report makes the case plainly: Kong is built for where that architecture is headed.
Kong Partner Summit 2026 + Partner Award winners #
The week kicked off with the annual Kong Partner Summit. The strategy-focused event focuses on strengthening alliances between Kong and the members of our global partner ecosystem.
This year's honorees were recognized for achievements spanning joint customer wins, geographic impact, AI-focused pipeline and pursuits, solution innovation and integration, and investment in Kong. The 2026 Partner Award recipients include:
Besides snagging shirts and stickers from the swag store, one of the hottest tickets at API + AI Summit was making custom mechanical keyboards with Kong electric-lime highlights.
Kong's new mascot and Head of Ape-erations, Karl, was all over API + AI Summit 2026.
Sundown shindig caps off day one of Summit 2026 #
The InterContinental Los Angeles, the site of Summit 2026, is the tallest building on the West Coast.
With sessions, panels, labs, and networking during the day and parties in the evening atop the 73rd floor, API + AI Summit 2026 offered an epic view of the city — and of what's happening today and coming tomorrow in the agentic era.
The API + AI Summit 2026 evening party took place across multiple spaces at InterContinental Los Angeles, including Spire 73 on the top floor and poolside with a live band, claw machine game, and more.
Kong Innovator Award Winners 2026 #
Our annual Kong Innovator Awards celebrate the people actually doing the work — the builders, engineers, and teams using Kong to solve hard problems in ways we didn't expect.
Last yearLast year, we celebrated teams from United Airlines, BMW, H&M, Siemens, SeatGeek, and more for their achievements in solving real business problems with innovative approaches. This year, we looked for those teams in the trenches, coming up with creative solutions to complex problems.
The team at Cox Automotive accepts their Kong Innovator Award at API + AI Summit 2026.
Kong Build Sprint 2026 Winners #
Before the expo floor opened, a group of builders was already hard at work in the Kong Build Sprint, which tasked developers with building something real on Kong in a matter of weeks. This year's winners were announced at Summit.
-
**1st Place — Vard | Led by Pavan Aripakula | **Most differentiated build in the field, solving a problem real customers deal with every day, backed by a demo that showed the work behind it.
-
**2nd Place — KongChampion_Forever | **Led by Sachin Ghumbre | Strong technical execution paired with a genuinely practical use of Kong's tooling.
-
3rd Place — ctc-global-sg | Led by Fernando Karnagi and Alinda Liaw Siew Ni | An agent swarm concept tied into Kong in a real, working way.
Pavan Aripakula, Application Security |Solutions Architect at Harness, speaks after winning first place in this year's Kong Build Sprint.
Onwards! #
That's all for this year! Thanks to everyone who attended and to the crew and staff who helped make this year's event a massive success.
Standing up a production agent means taking it through six stages: React : the agent must be able to react to events as they occur internal or external to the business Discover : Once running, can the agent find what it needs? This means MCP Servers
Alex Drag
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
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
Agentic AI governance is the structured management of the authority an organization hands to autonomous AI systems that plan and take action on its behalf. It covers what an AI agent is allowed to do, which systems it can touch, and how those permis
Kong
When an AI application fails, knowing that an individual model call returned a 200 isn’t enough. You need to know what led to it. Kong stitches the interactions associated with an AI session together, giving developers a view across the sequence of
Alex Drag
Turning an API into an MCP server sounds straightforward: expose each API operation as an MCP tool and let the agent decide which one to use. For small APIs, that can work well. But enterprise APIs can contain hundreds of operations. And as agents c
Alex Drag
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
Standing up a production agent means taking it through six stages: React : the agent must be able to react to events as they occur internal or external to the business Discover : Once running, can the agent find what it needs? This means MCP Servers
Alex Drag
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
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
Agentic AI governance is the structured management of the authority an organization hands to autonomous AI systems that plan and take action on its behalf. It covers what an AI agent is allowed to do, which systems it can touch, and how those permis
Kong
When an AI application fails, knowing that an individual model call returned a 200 isn’t enough. You need to know what led to it. Kong stitches the interactions associated with an AI session together, giving developers a view across the sequence of
Alex Drag
Turning an API into an MCP server sounds straightforward: expose each API operation as an MCP tool and let the agent decide which one to use. For small APIs, that can work well. But enterprise APIs can contain hundreds of operations. And as agents c
Alex Drag
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
Standing up a production agent means taking it through six stages: React : the agent must be able to react to events as they occur internal or external to the business Discover : Once running, can the agent find what it needs? This means MCP Servers
Alex Drag
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
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
Agentic AI governance is the structured management of the authority an organization hands to autonomous AI systems that plan and take action on its behalf. It covers what an AI agent is allowed to do, which systems it can touch, and how those permis
Kong
When an AI application fails, knowing that an individual model call returned a 200 isn’t enough. You need to know what led to it. Kong stitches the interactions associated with an AI session together, giving developers a view across the sequence of
Alex Drag
Turning an API into an MCP server sounds straightforward: expose each API operation as an MCP tool and let the agent decide which one to use. For small APIs, that can work well. But enterprise APIs can contain hundreds of operations. And as agents c
Alex Drag
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
Ready to see Kong in action? #
Get a personalized walkthrough of Kong's platform tailored to your architecture, use cases, and scale requirements.