If your 2026 resolution is to finally get AI costs under control, we've got you covered.
Every January, the same resolutions show up: eat better, exercise more, finally learn that language, finally figure out that production use case for AI agents (OK, this one isn’t so typical unless you operate in our universe).
But if you're responsible for your organization's AI strategy, we'd like to suggest a different one for 2026: stop letting AI be a cost center.
Because that’s going to kill your ability to actually drive maximum agentic AI value.
In case you missed it over the holidays, we shipped something that can help. We were going to wait until now to announce, but the Christmas gift angle was just too good not to take advantage of. Konnect Metering & Billing is now generally available — bringing monetization, billing, and real-time cost governance to the same platform that already manages your APIs, AI gateways, and event streams.
Set yourself up to succeed in the age of AI connectivity. Here's the TL;DR on why it matters and how it can make 2026 the year your AI program starts paying for itself.
Last year, enterprises went all-in on AI, and as many as 9 out of 10 orgs were actively adopting AI agents. The investments were real. The experiments were plentiful.
The ROI? For most organizations’ finances, it's not even TBD. It's flat-out negative (think a quarter of orgs bleeding 16% or more gross business margins).
The problem isn't the technology — it's the lack of financial governance infrastructure around it.
Most AI programs today can't answer basic questions: What does it cost to serve a single customer? Which products are margin-positive? Who's burning through LLM tokens without generating value? How much does all that stuff behind my MCP server (the APIs and event data that are the actual context for MCP to leverage) actually cost as a part of agentic workflows?
If any of this sounds familiar, you're not alone. (If it doesn’t sound familiar, you may want to take a look at the financial situation of all of these resources, as you might be part of the 84% of orgs hemorrhaging margins and not know about it yet.)
Either way, you don't have to carry that ambiguity into the new year.
Konnect Metering & Billing gives you a unified engine for metering, billing, and governance — spanning APIs, LLMs, (and eventually) MCP servers, and event streams.
Want to learn more? Get an overview of AI monetization, get a deeper dive in this Konnect Metering & Billing blog, or dig into the Metering & Billing docs.
So, as you’re returning to work from the holidays, you don’t have to work that hard to figure out how to answer your coworkers’ much-too-often-asked questions about your New Year’s resolutions. You can just copy and paste the below and share.
The companies that win with AI won't just be the ones with the best models — they'll be the ones with the best unit economics. That means knowing what every capability costs, pricing it appropriately, and enforcing governance at runtime.
That's what Konnect Metering & Billing delivers. And it's available now.
Here's to a 2026 with better margins, clearer costs, and AI programs that actually show ROI. Happy New Year from the Kong team!
Ready to get started? Learn more by reading the documentation or request a demo.
Looking to discover more about AI connectivity? Join us live from the New York Stock Exchange on February 2. Kong's leadership team will show you how to unify your AI data path and move from fragmented experiments to production-ready infrastructure. Register now!
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