# Gartner® | How to Integrate AI Agents With Your Enterprise Applications
Access the report to learn why Gartner calls for a gateway-based AI control layer as the foundation for enterprise AI agent deployments.
- - **Gateways Are Required**: Centralizing control through a gateway layer improves consistency, scalability, and maintainability over embedding controls in individual interfaces.
- - **The AI Control Layer:** This layer handles routing, auth, rate limiting, load balancing, caching, and logging — mirroring what API gateways already provide.
- - **MCP + APIs, Governed Together:** Ungoverned MCP servers introduce real security risk. A centralized gateway layer keeps both MCP and APIs properly governed.
## Architecting for Agentic AI: What Gartner Says Enterprises Must Build Now
The 2025 Gartner Generative and Agentic AI in Enterprise Applications Survey reports that 75% of respondents were piloting, deploying, or had already deployed AI agents. Twenty percent of respondents to the Gartner AI Maturity and Organizational Mandates for 2026 Survey stated that integration of AI in other applications or systems was one of the top three barriers to implementing AI initiatives.
The report prescribes a three-pillar approach: exposing AI-consumable interfaces, implementing a centralized AI control layer for governance, and providing access to agent-ready data. Critically, Gartner calls for a combination of traditional API gateways and emerging AI-specific gateways to meet this requirement — and warns explicitly against ungoverned, embedded MCP implementations that create security blind spots.
This is the architecture Kong was built for. Kong's platform governs the full AI data path — LLM traffic, MCP tool access, traditional APIs, and agent-to-agent communication — in a single, unified control plane. No point solutions. No governance gaps. We believe this is just the infrastructure Gartner prescribes, production-ready at enterprise scale.
## KONG POWERS RAPID AI INNOVATION AT ENTERPRISE SCALE
Gartner, How to Integrate AI Agents With Your Enterprise Applications, 23 February 2026, Andrew Humphreys, Mark O'Neill, Shrey Pasricha, Keith Guttridge
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