API + AI Summit 2026 Recap: Helping the World Move AI

Kong’s API + AI Summit 2026 brought more than 1,000 engineers, architects, and business leaders to Los Angeles for two days focused on deploying, governing, and scaling AI systems and agentic architectures. The company positioned its Kong Konnect platform as an AI connectivity control plane for managing APIs, models, agents, MCP tools, security, cost, discovery, and observability, while CTO Marco Palladino introduced Volcano, an AI application stack featuring branchable Postgres databases, durable functions, hosting, authentication, storage, and distributed locks. Product announcements included AI Cost Management, general availability of Context Management, Token Vault for agent credentials, an Agent and MCP Registry paired with Kong Catalog, Advanced AI Observability, and a Webhook Engine for event-driven agent workflows. Kong also highlighted its seventh consecutive placement as a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for API Management, honored ecosystem partners including AWS and several global services firms, and featured its new mascot, Karl, throughout the event. Additional activities included customer and industry presentations, networking events, the Kong Innovator Awards, and a Build Sprint won by Pavan Aripakula’s Vard project, with selected session recordings planned for release in the following weeks.

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