API Summit 2025 Recap: AI Connectivity and the Agentic Era

From BMW to United Airlines to Prudential, many innovative organizations had a presence at API Summit 2025 to share their API and AI successes and lessons learned.

On Wednesday, Kong SVP of Product Reza Shafii joined Demetry Zilberg, CTO of alterDomus, and Rupesh Papneja, Principal Engineer at PEXA, to explore one of the most pressing topics in tech today: powering real-world AI applications with secure, reliable, and discoverable APIs. 

“AI, AI, AI: it’s all we seem to be talking about,” Reza said, emphasizing that beyond the hype and noise, the key to meaningful AI outcomes lies in high-quality data and the infrastructure that delivers it. “Garbage in, garbage out,” he noted to underline the fact businesses need to feed nutritious data and quality APIs to make agents successful.

Reza Shafii, SVP of Product of Kong, with Demetry Zilberg, CTO of alterDomus

Zilberg shared how alterDomus turned to Kong to accelerate time-to-market, improve service quality, and monetize their growing API products. “Without Kong, we couldn’t deliver the velocity or reliability our customers expect,” Zilberg said. “Kong Konnect has been essential to turning our data and APIs into revenue.”

Papneja echoed a similar story at PEXA, where foundational automation and Kong’s MCP servers helped shrink deployment cycles from weeks to days. “To build AI agents that do real work, you need the right platform; Kong Konnect and Insomnia gave us that,” Papneja said.

For more insights into how organizations are innovating with Kong, check out Kong's customer success stories.

Oliver Heinze, Product Owner - Connected Company, BMW AG, accepts the Innovator of the Year Award at the API Summit 2025 Innovator Awards. Heinze also presented at API Summit 2025, discussing BMW's overnight API management revolution.

At API Summit, we explored how the agentic era may change the way we work and how organizations and individuals can adapt to keep ahead of the competition.

On Tuesday, Cassie Kozyrkov — CEO of Kozyr, AI luminary, former Chief Decision Scientist at Google, and pioneer of decision intelligence — discussed what it takes to lead in an AI-first world. Then, we talked innovation (and had some laughs) with a man who knows a thing or two about reinvention, Kal Penn, the Emmy-nominated actor, writer, and producer who pivoted to public service during his stint as a White House staff member.

Wednesday, we sat down with renowned computer scientist, author, entrepreneur, futurist, and inventor Ray Kurzweil to explore the future of AI, computation, and human intelligence. 

Kurzweil shared a striking view of the exponential price-performance curve of computing from 1939 to to today, showing how rapidly advancing compute power is setting the stage for the next era of intelligence. He underscored that AI is on a trajectory to merge with human biological intelligence, unlocking capabilities far beyond what’s possible today.

From accelerating progress across industries to extending human health and longevity, Kurzweil believes AI will act as a powerful augmentor rather than a replacement. 

“By 2029, we’ll see a world filled with intelligent robots working alongside us,” he said, underscoring a future where human potential and machine capability evolve together.

Augusto Marietti, CEO and Co-Founder of Kong, chats with futurist Ray Kurzweil about AI and its potential impact on humanity.

Management of AI includes monetization of AI. As departments in your organization rush to use LLMs and build agents, AI monetization, metering, and billing becomes a necessity. 

That's why we announced Konnect Metering & Billing, powered by OpenMeter, a new solution for monetizing APIs, AI models, and data streams. This integration aims to help organizations unlock new revenue by providing unified usage monitoring, flexible pricing, and real-time billing.

By integrating OpenMeter into Kong Konnect, we're giving organizations the tools to transform their digital services into profitable assets while maintaining strong governance in the agentic AI era. This unified approach accelerates monetization and provides deep insights to optimize strategies, help reduce churn, and capitalize on emerging opportunities.

This announcement follows Kong's recent acquisition of OpenMeter. Konnect Metering and Billing will be available as part of Kong Konnect in Q4 2025. Kong Konnect is a unified AI and API platform designed to support all aspects of modern API and AI connectivity.

Marco Palladino, CTO and Co-Founder of Kong

To address the critical barriers hindering MCP's adoption in the enterprise, we launched Kong's enterprise MCP Gateway, powered by Kong AI Gateway 3.12.

This release tackles the challenges of server sprawl, security, cost, and resilience head-on. The key capabilities include standardized MCP server generation from any existing REST API, complete with automated policy enforcement. 

We also introduced a new OAuth 2.1 plugin, aligning with the latest MCP specification to centralize authentication and secure all MCP tools at the gateway level. And we unveiled purpose-built MCP observability, providing granular visibility into tool usage, performance metrics, and the context bloat that drives up LLM costs.

Liz Brand, Global Head of API, Developer and Employee Experience Engineering, Prudential; Krithika Prakash, Sr. Distinguished Engineer, Capital One; and Patricia Papadaki, Staff Customer Success Manager, Kong

Beyond the gateway, we announced a new suite of MCP support across the Konnect platform to power agentic workflows. A key part of this was transforming the Konnect Developer Portal into an MCP server with a single click. This enables AI coding tools and agents to programmatically discover APIs, request access, and generate client code directly within their integrated development environment.

We introduced KAi, our new agentic assistant in Konnect, designed to automate governance, accelerate debugging, and assist with API design. Looking ahead, we shared our vision for the future of integration with the announcement of the Kong MCP Composer and Kong MCP Runner, slated for release in early 2026 to build and run the next generation of AI-powered integrations.

Marco Palladino, CTO and Co-Founder of Kong, and Ninos Gabriel, Managing Director, Enterprise Architecture / Strategic Enterprise Platforms / Cloud Solutions, United Airlines

We announced the open-sourcing of the Volcano SDK, a new TypeScript SDK for building AI agents. 

We created Volcano to solve a problem we faced internally: the complexity of writing production-ready agents that combine multiple LLMs with real-world tools via MCP. Volcano dramatically simplifies this, compressing over 100 lines of boilerplate code for context management, tool schemas, and error handling into a simple, elegant chain of promises.

Get started building powerful AI agents today at volcano.dev.

We announced Insomnia 12, a release focused on enabling an AI trust layer for developers. 

We previewed AI-powered commit generation, which suggests logical, descriptive commit messages to ensure Git history is clean and transparent. We also demonstrated the new MCP Client, a critical tool for validating MCP servers to prevent failures in agentic workflows. Finally, we showed how developers can now generate complete mock servers from natural language, a URL, or an OpenAPI Spec, drastically reducing dependency bottlenecks and giving developers more time to build.

We addressed the widespread challenge of siloed API and identity management by introducing Kong Identity, a new approach that consolidates these critical functions into Kong Konnect. By bringing API management and application identity together, Kong Identity takes control of machine-to-machine (M2M) security, implementing OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect to offload authentication and authorization directly to the API gateway. This unified platform provides a single pane of glass for managing all API traffic and security policies, strengthening security posture and reducing operational costs.

Kongers pose in front of the iconic Nasdaq Times Square billboard highlighting API Summit 2025.

The conversation around event-driven architecture took a major step forward with the announcement of the GA of Kong's Event Gateway for Kafka. 

We showcased how organizations can close the governance gap in EDA by treating their Kafka streams as valuable data products. The Event Gateway acts as a central control point, extending the robust lifecycle management used for synchronous APIs to asynchronous workloads. This allows teams to enforce consistent security and reliability policies like authentication mediation, ACLs, and schema validation at the gateway layer, transforming event streams into discoverable, self-service products.

Reza Shafii, SVP of Product at Kong

To solve the challenge of API discovery in multi-gateway environments, we announced a new native integration between the Konnect Service Catalog and AWS API Gateway. 

Recognizing that many enterprises have disparate API deployments, this integration allows organizations to discover and catalog APIs running in AWS, creating a single, unified inventory. This ensures AI agents can find all the API resources they need to function effectively and enhances security and governance. Once visible in the catalog, these services can be measured against organizational standards using Service Catalog scorecards, extending automated compliance across the entire digital ecosystem.

The new Konnect Datakit Flows Editor provides a choice for how teams approach API orchestration. Recognizing that some teams prefer visual tools while others prefer configuration files, the Flow Editor offers an intuitive, graphical interface where workflows are represented as diagrams on a canvas. This visual approach accelerates onboarding, enables natural collaborative design, and drives efficient prototyping, ensuring teams have the right tool for their preferred workflow.

Cindy Maurice, Senior Partner Marketing Manager at Kong, speaks at Kong Partner Summit 2025.

We tackled the growing challenge of operational blindness in hybrid environments by showing how to unify API and AI observability. As AI applications become deeply integrated with existing API ecosystems, fragmented monitoring creates significant risks. We demonstrated how Kong Konnect, through AI Gateway and Advanced Analytics, delivers a unified observability architecture. This provides a single source of truth for cross-system latency, cost attribution for LLM consumption, failure correlation, and a consistent security posture, empowering teams to stay ahead of the curve.

Building on the unification of our Ingress Controller and Gateway Operator, we announced the upcoming release of Kong Operator 2.1. This release represented the next step in unifying Kubernetes operations, introducing powerful new capabilities for a first-class Kubernetes experience. 

A major highlight is Gateway API support in hybrid mode, allowing teams to use the Gateway API to manage both Konnect and self-managed deployments. Other key features included tighter integration with the Konnect Debugger, automatic cataloging of Kubernetes services into the Konnect Service Catalog, and a seamless flow of those services into the Developer Portal.

We continued to enhance our multi-cloud agentic infrastructure with the announcement of fully managed Redis instances for Konnect Dedicated Cloud Gateways (DCGWs). 

This launch removes one of the final barriers to adopting enterprise-grade API management by eliminating the need for customers to provision and maintain their own Redis infrastructure for powerful plugins like Rate Limiting and Caching. With Redis now managed by Kong and co-located with gateway data planes, customers get zero operational overhead and enterprise-grade performance, which is especially critical for AI use cases like AI rate-limiting to control costs and intelligent caching to improve LLM response times.

Thanks to everyone who joined us in NYC for API Summit 2025! We hope you left with new ideas, good memories, and the cutest swag in the game.

The winners of Kong's 2025 Innovator Awards were honored. The awards spotlight customers that have demonstrated the most forward-thinking and innovative use cases of Kong's API and AI technologies.

• Top Kong Innovator - Americas: SeatGeek, for centralizing LLM request validation at the gateway layer with Kong Konnect.
• Top Kong Innovator - Europe: Siemens, for using Kong's plugin system to expose event-based data as APIs and democratize access to Kafka messages.
• Top Kong Innovator - Asia-Pacific: Seaco, for replacing legacy EDI processes with APIs and infusing AI into their API process.
• Top Kong Innovator - Public Sector: HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC), for streamlining API delivery and achieving significant cost savings and productivity boosts with Kong.
• Top Kong Innovator - Finance: Verifone, for optimizing security, authentication, and authorization for their payment platforms and contributing to Kong's feature roadmap.
• Top Kong Innovator - AI: H&M, for pivoting to a secure and scalable AI platform using Kong AI Gateway.
• Top Kong Innovator - Enterprise Transformation: United Airlines, for modernizing legacy systems and achieving reliable, secure, and scalable data exchange with Kong Konnect.
• Innovator of the Year: BMW, for drastically reducing latencies and simplifying architecture by adopting Kong for their ConnectedDrive traffic.

See the press release for more details about these success stories. And for more innovative use cases, check out Kong's customer stories.

Kong announced the winners of its Partner Awards at the Partner Summit 2025 on Oct. 14. The awards recognize the trailblazers in Kong’s partner ecosystem that deliver meaningful outcomes around the world. 

This year's winners include:

• Partner of the Year Global: AWS
• Partner of the Year AMS: Cognizant
• Partner of the Year EMEA: TCS
• Partner of the Year APJ: Blulebik Vulcan Co., Ltd
• Innovation Excellence: Ensono
• Technical Excellence: AHEAD
• Rising Star AMS: Persistent
• Rising Star EMEA: Coforge
• Strategic Partnership Excellence: Capgemini
• Digital Transformation Excellence: Accenture

That's all for this year! Stay tuned as API Summit 2025 sessions will be available to watch on demand soon. Sign up now to get updates about API Summit 2026 in San Francisco.

API Summit 2025 staff celebrate the closing of this year's event.