API + AI Summit 2026 is Kong's annual gathering, now in its ninth year. 

The event was created for engineers, architects, and leaders with certification opportunities and tracks focused on token cost management, agentic architecture best practices, context engineering, and AI governance.

Talks and insights come courtesy of brainy builders from Spotify, AWS, Southwest Airlines, Dell, Microsoft, CVS Health, Pandora, LinkedIn, and more — sharing lessons from running AI in production.

The [_session catalog_](https://konghq.com/events/conferences/api-ai-summit/sessions)_session catalog_ is live and features a smorgasbord of hot takes and lessons-learned tech tales. Here are seven sessions worth checking out.

*Mahima Mohana, Senior Software Engineer @ Southwest Airlines*

Southwest rolled out spec-driven AI agents across 300+ engineers instead of relying on ad hoc prompting. The result: about three developer-days saved per sprint, an estimated $8.6M a year — and just as many lessons about where agents still lose developer trust.

*Kapil Mirchandani, Machine Learning Platform Engineer @ Spotify*

Spotify built a framework to decide whether to build AI observability in-house or buy it. The real differentiators weren't the obvious features — they were API extensibility and how a vendor holds up under production-scale load.

*Ankur Gupta, Sr. Staff TPM, AI Infrastructure @ LinkedIn*

Deploying a model is the easy part. LinkedIn walks through what breaks when inference has to serve millions of requests under real latency and cost constraints — deployment coordination, GPU limits, incident response, all of it.

*Jason Ehmke, CTO @ Ally Financial*
API platforms were built for humans, and agents don't behave like humans — they retry aggressively, skip the docs, and coordinate with each other in ways that multiply the governance problem fast. Ally's CTO draws on running a Fortune 500 bank's API platform to lay out what changes and how to spot a misbehaving agent before it does damage.

*Gang Guo, Lead Architect @ Wipro*

Salesforce's Headless 360 shift makes every capability reachable through APIs and MCP tools, no UI required. Get a breakdown of the four governance gaps that open up the moment agents become the primary consumer.

*Tye Davis, Head of Technical Marketing @ NOMA Securities*

Access control tells you what an agent can call. It doesn't tell you whether what it's doing right now is normal. NOMA splits agent governance into three problems — access, behavior, and runtime enforcement — and asks whether your stack actually covers all three.

*Steve Roberts, Global Strategic Advisory Services Lead @ Kong*

What happens when an autonomous agent gets stuck in a loop, mutating database records hundreds of times a second? This session names that failure mode — agentic blast radius — and works through why traditional API infrastructure was never built to catch it.

*There's plenty more where those came from. *[_*Browse the schedule*_](https://konghq.com/events/conferences/api-ai-summit/sessions)_*Browse the schedule*_* for more must-see talks, tech tales, and training.*

Here's a bit about what to expect from Kong's API + AI Summit 2026.

• - **Roadmap sessions and in-person product talks you can't get anywhere else.** Kong's founders and product leaders take the stage with deep dives into new and upcoming launches. Get the latest first. And then talk to the people behind the tech to better understand what this might mean for your organization.
• - **Lessons learned in production courtesy of the people who shipped it.** Real deployments. Real trade-offs. Real stories from engineers and leaders on what broke, what scaled, and what they'd do differently. Sessions are organized across tracks, so you can follow the thread that's most relevant to your role and your stack.
• - **Hands-on workshops with the teams building the tools. **Roll up your sleeves. Build, test, and break things side by side with teams solving the same infrastructure problems you are.
• - **"A-ha!" hallway conversations with peers facing shared challenges.** The conversations you didn't know you needed. The ones that start with "you're doing *what*?" and end with someone making a diagram with sugar packets. That only happens when you're in the room.

There are a couple of different options to consider when attending API + AI Summit 2026.

1. - **Full Experience + Certification Training: **This is the whole enchilada with a side of cert-training guacamole. We're talking keynotes, workshops, launches, networking, and more. *Plus,* pre-event certification training on Sept. 29. Seats are limited, and they're filling fast.
2. - **The Full Experience: **This is the full in-person experience. Keynotes, workshops, deep sessions, product launches, meetings with peers, and everything in between.

Need to make the case to your manager? We've got a [justification letter template](https://konghq.com/events/conferences/api-ai-summit/justification-letter)justification letter template to help with just that.

[_Secure your spot today_](https://konghq.com/events/conferences/api-ai-summit)_Secure your spot today_ before the price increases. Join Kong and the people making AI work at API + AI Summit 2026.