The customer was an early adopter of AI and knew that they needed to enable the developer community to easily and securely access various AI models in order to build intelligent applications. However, they encountered several challenges, including managing the complexity of deploying and scaling multiple AI models across different teams, centralizing AI traffic, and adhering to Responsible AI practices. An AI Gateway was a natural solution to these challenges. With an AI gateway, they could centralize management and access to AI models, simplify the deployment process, enhance security measures, and ensure compliance with standards. 

In an innovative and competitive industry like biotechnology, AI is a crucial business investment area. The company needed to scale its AI usage across the organization to continue to drive R&D, automate processes, and position itself for future success. But without an AI Gateway in place, the company was at great risk of inefficient and non-compliant AI usage – a significant issue in a highly regulated industry.

When the team was evaluating AI gateway solution, several factors made Kong stand out. First and foremost, they found that Kong's API management capabilities were a perfect fit for their needs. They were also impressed by its ability to seamlessly integrate with their existing infrastructure, allowing the company to manage and monitor AI models with ease. Because Kong’s architecture natively integrates with Amazon Bedrock, the company was able to manage, secure, and orchestrate multiple AI models from AWS and other providers through one control plane. As AWS customers, this seamless connection was especially important. On top of this, the company had already been a Kong customer for many years and had built a strong foundation of partnership. This established trust and successful collaboration made it Kong an easy choice. The company also cited Kong's ability to support a wide range of AI models and scale effortlessly as their needs grow, giving the team confidence that it could handle the demands of their diverse and evolving AI initiatives. Lastly, Kong's commitment to Responsible AI aligned perfectly with the company’s values and dedication to ethical AI practices and transparency.

Working with the Kong team, the company has implemented the AI Gateway in a number of ways. They primarily leverage artificial intelligence to drive advancements across drug discovery, smart manufacturing, and enterprise-wide conversational agents. Some key initiatives include:

• - AI in Drug Discovery: A major area of AI investment is in the area of drug discovery. By utilizing advanced machine learning algorithms, the company is able to analyze complex biological data to identify potential drug candidates more efficiently. This approach accelerates the discovery phase, reduces costs, and enhances the accuracy of predicting the success rates of new compounds in clinical trials.
• - Smart Manufacturing Initiatives: AI is also at the forefront of efforts to optimize manufacturing processes. Through predictive maintenance, real-time quality monitoring, and process automation, the company ensures that production lines operate with maximum efficiency and minimal downtime. These smart manufacturing initiatives not only improve operational efficiency but also ensure that all products meet the highest standards of quality and safety.
• - Enterprise-Wide Conversational Agents:  The company is deploying AI-driven conversational agents across the enterprise to enhance customer service, streamline internal processes, and improve employee productivity. These agents, powered by natural language processing (NLP), can handle a wide range of tasks from answering customer inquiries to assisting employees with routine administrative tasks, thereby freeing up human resources for more strategic activities.

Since implementing Kong AI Gateway and completing migration of all GenAI applications onto Kong, the company has seen a number of positive impacts to their business. Some of these results include:

**Standardized Access to AI Services: **

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  The team now has a unified platform for accessing AI tools and services in a secure, consistent manner. This standardization ensures that all AI initiatives, whether in drug discovery, manufacturing, or customer service, adhere to the same high standards of data security and governance.

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  The Kong AI Gateway also serves as a unified access point for multiple AI models and providers, simplifying integration and management. Now, the company is able to capture and log all AI requests and responses, enabling detailed observability. This data can be analyzed to improve AI accuracy, monitor adoption, audit usage, and optimize costs. For example, they are able to see that they have proxied over 40M AI transactions in the last 4 months, enabling better predictability and capacity planning.

**Enhanced Innovation and Collaboration: **

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  By offering a centralized and secure access point, the AI Gateway enables developers across the company to innovate faster. Teams can easily collaborate, share insights, and build on each other's work, accelerating the development and deployment of AI solutions across different business units.

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  By abstracting away cross-cutting concerns like security, observability, and cost management, AI Gateway has allowed developers to focus on building AI applications without reinventing infrastructure. This accelerates innovation while maintaining organizational control

**Scalability and Flexibility: **The Kong AI Gateway supports scalable AI model deployment and management, allowing the company to handle large datasets and complex computations seamlessly. This scalability ensures that their AI solutions can grow and adapt in line with the evolving needs of the business.

**Enhanced Performance through Load Balancing: **Load balancing across multiple model deployments has improved resilience and increased token throughput capacity, ensuring better availability and performance.

**Improved Security and Compliance: **The plugin architecture has helped the team arm themselves against prompt injection attacks by validating prompts before they reach AI models.

**Simplified Multi-Model and Multi-Provider Integration: **By offering a single interface to connect with various AI providers or self-hosted models, Kong AI Gateway has reduced development complexity and enabled teams to leverage the best model for each use case. They support model failover and seamless switching, enhancing reliability.