Exploring AI Advancements at Kong API Summit 2025
Marco Palladino, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Kong, shares insights on the groundbreaking announcements from the Kong API Summit 2025. Join Paul Nashawaty, practice lead and principal analyst of theCUBE Research, as they uncover the innovations and strategic developments designed to push the boundaries of artificial intelligence infrastructure.
In this insightful discussion, Palladino highlights Kong's latest advances in AI infrastructure, particularly the introduction of MCP support—a key technology similar to the role of REST in application programming interfaces. With expertise as co-founder and CTO, Palladino explains how these developments streamline AI transformation for enterprises. Nashawaty hosts this conversation, delving into the implications of these innovations for application development and modernization.
Key takeaways from the discussion include an understanding of how Kong is poised to transform AI adoption in enterprises. Palladino emphasizes that while AI holds immense potential, a significant number of businesses falter in their AI journeys due to complex infrastructure challenges. With the introduction of MCP server capabilities and tools such as the Volcano software development kit, Palladino notes that Kong aims to simplify these challenges and enhance developer productivity, ensuring seamless AI integration across business processes.
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Marco Palladino, Kong
Exploring AI Advancements at Kong API Summit 2025
Marco Palladino, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Kong, shares insights on the groundbreaking announcements from the Kong API Summit 2025. Join Paul Nashawaty, practice lead and principal analyst of theCUBE Research, as they uncover the innovations and strategic developments designed to push the boundaries of artificial intelligence infrastructure.
In this insightful discussion, Palladino highlights Kong's latest advances in AI infrastructure, particularly the introduction of MCP support—a key technology similar to the role of REST in application programming interfaces. With expertise as co-founder and CTO, Palladino explains how these developments streamline AI transformation for enterprises. Nashawaty hosts this conversation, delving into the implications of these innovations for application development and modernization.
Key takeaways from the discussion include an understanding of how Kong is poised to transform AI adoption in enterprises. Palladino emphasizes that while AI holds immense potential, a significant number of businesses falter in their AI journeys due to complex infrastructure challenges. With the introduction of MCP server capabilities and tools such as the Volcano software development kit, Palladino notes that Kong aims to simplify these challenges and enhance developer productivity, ensuring seamless AI integration across business processes.
In this Kong API Summit ’25 interview, theCUBE Research’s Paul Nashawaty sits down with Marco Palladino, co-founder and chief technology officer of Kong, to unpack how agentic AI is reshaping enterprise connectivity. Palladino explains why AI is “the next universal interface” and details Kong’s newest AI infrastructure advances: first-class support for the MCP protocol, new MCP Gateway capabilities in Kong AI Gateway 3.12 alongside existing LLM Gateway features and auto-generation of MCP servers from any RESTful API via a simple YAML file. He cites real-world...Read more
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What is your professional background and the nature of your work?add
What is MCP and what role does it play in the development of agentic AI technologies?add
What announcements were made today regarding new products or developments related to the AI infrastructure offered by Kong?add
>> Hello and welcome back to Kong Summit 2025. My name is Paul Nashawaty. I'm the practice lead and principal analyst at theCUBE Research for app dev biz, and I cover everything, application development and modernization. And I'm coming to you live from the show floor today. I'm joined by Marco. Marco, how you doing?
Marco Palladino
>> Doing pretty well, thank you.
Paul Nashawaty
>> Great to have you on theCUBE.
Marco Palladino
>> Thanks for having me here.
Paul Nashawaty
>> Yeah, great. Want to tell the audience a little bit about who you are and what you do?
Marco Palladino
>> Yes. I'm the co-founder and CTO of Kong. Kong is an API and AI infrastructure company. So, we power the underlying connectivity of pretty much the largest enterprises in the world, especially here in the United States.
Paul Nashawaty
>> Kong has been an exciting ride. It's been fantastic to watch and really fascinating to watch you grow over the years. It's really been awesome, but there's a lot happening with regards to the announcements, the keynotes was really exciting. The buzz on the show floor, the customer interviews I've had, really, really awesome. But it's just showing how much you're growing up. But yeah, can you talk a little bit about some of the new announcements?
Marco Palladino
>> Yeah, for sure. I mean, honestly, when we're looking at what's happening in the industry right now, we're looking at AI effectively transforming pretty much every business. Now, whether AI is being used to transform internal business processes or whether it's being used to create exciting customer experiences, AI is fundamentally the next-generation technology that's transforming the enterprises from the inside out. And so, today, we made some several announcements, but perhaps the most important ones were around our AI infrastructure products. And that is the infrastructure platform that we're using to power AI connectivity across pretty much every agent that the enterprise is building across, pretty much every use case that the enterprise is building. So, that has been very exciting. And what makes the release today more exciting than the other ones is our full support for MCP. MCP is this new protocol that basically determines how agents are communicating with APIs and with our data. And effectively, we added first-class support for MCP. So, in addition to the existing LLM support, we can now cover all bases when it comes to agentic AI use cases.
Paul Nashawaty
>> I think it's really fascinating, honestly, because your keynote really... It was intriguing to watch the MCP support, the announcements. API calls and such, that's something that it's not new, but it's also something that when you look at it from an agent perspective, from AI's perspective, it is new, so it's changing. But when I think about my practice and what I cover, I think about past, present, and future. I think about what's going on with the heritage applications and what it means to bridge the gap between old and new. And new being what's happening with containerization? What's happening with orchestration? What's happening with applications that are using agentic AI solutions? And how are they moving towards the future? And in your keynote, you were talking about the announcements around the MCP servers and what you were doing with MCP. Let's double-click a little bit down on that and let's talk about that.
Marco Palladino
>> Well, look, the thing about AI is that it's very exciting and everybody understands the power of AI, but some of the things that we brought up today at the keynote is our 95% of the organizations that are attempting to transform their businesses with AI are actually failing, and that is from the MIT. 95%, that's a huge number, right? So, our job at Kong is to try to get that number to a much better place. And so, today we've heard it from customers that are Gateway customers, AI Gateway customers of Kong, like Prudential, how they're transforming their businesses with AI and how they're powering all of their systems with AI and AI Gateway. And really, it all sounds great in theory, the ability to automate our processes, the ability to create compelling user experiences, but there's lots of decisions that we have to make. And most of these decisions, turns out, you can abstract them away in underlying AI infrastructure. So, our job is to make our customers even more successful, try to get that 95% number to a much lower place, much lower number. And being able to effectively abstract away all that complexity. Complexity around routing, around guard railing, around security, around building ecosystems of MCP tools that we can leverage to build our agents. So, there's lots of decisions that have to be made, and if we can remove some of that decision making into the AI infrastructure product, then we can make our customers more successful.
Paul Nashawaty
>> I agree with you, actually. I'm going to piggyback off that MIT study because in my research, I find that 51% of organizations are using AI in their production workloads today. And now, I would say that data's probably even low. I would say it's probably even higher than that, that there's more AI being used in production applications. So, there is a need to harmonize this. There's a big challenge when it comes to skill gap issues, complexity, friction, moving from heritage environments to new environments. That's where I see the huge potential with what I was seeing in your keynote and Kong's announcements with the MCP server, the developer portal, the API Gateway, that's a big area of reducing that friction. So, Volcano, the SDK that's coming out, that's a big area. That's definitely an area that I think is going to help with adoption. What are your thoughts on that?
Marco Palladino
>> 100%. We're seeing lots of excitement around the AI and lots of frameworks and toolings that are coming out in order to be able to support these excitement. And with Volcano SDK, which is our open source library to enable developers to build agents that are MCP-native in a much quicker way, we're taking some of the early lessons from existing frameworks out there, and we try to basically distill it, such as we can provide a framework that learns from all of those mistakes and it's much easier to use. Now, obviously, from a Kong standpoint, whether our customers use Volcano to build the agents or whether they're using something else, eventually they still need that AI infrastructure layer to be able to power those agents. So, Volcano for us is a way to make it easier for developers to build agents, but nevertheless, whatever they decide to use eventually has to go to a governed, compliant and secure platform. And that is what AI Gateway is all about.
Paul Nashawaty
>> Yeah, and I agree. I think that you're right. I think that giving your clients or your prospects and your customers the ability to take on what they need regardless of where they are in their journey, so they could be fully mature or they could be just entering the journey, you give them an option. But I don't want to gloss over this fact of the MCP server being like... It's really critical to the agentic AI era. It really is critical to that flexibility. A lot of organizations I speak to, they want to move into an AI direction. They want to move in these new modernization approaches, but they're a little bit shy to do it because they like going, "Okay. Well, what technology's going to be there in the next generation?" And we've seen a lot of change in the last six months, a lot of change over the last year. And maybe we could talk a little bit about why MCP support is so critical to that.
Marco Palladino
>> MCP became very quickly a foundational technology for pretty much everything that's agentic and everything that's AI. MCP represents to AI what REST represented to traditional APIs. It is a new protocol that enables agents to be able to communicate with third-party data sources, third-party services, just like an API, but it does it in agentic-native way, which means that it's real-time by default. It enables the discovery from the agents by default. So, it is fundamentally a modern protocol for building agentic AI. And of course, MCP, like every other API that we have, also needs to be governed, needs to be secure, needs to be observable. And so, today with Kong AI Gateway 3.12, we announced new MCP Gateway capabilities in addition to the LLM Gateway capabilities that the product already had. And effectively, now, Kong AI Gateway covers all bases, whether it's LLM, whether it's MCP, or whether it's traditional APIs. Well, that platform is now able to provide a unified control plane to govern, discover, expose, manage, and accelerate all of that traffic from one place. So, I think it's really a milestone for AI Gateway 3.12, the version we released today. It's really a milestone that really is going to be foundational for everything else that we're going to be building in the future.
Paul Nashawaty
>> So, would you say you have abstracted away the complexity for people trying to build?
Marco Palladino
>> Well, so think about it., Our agents need two things. They need LLMs for intelligence and they need an ecosystem of MCP servers or tools to be able to provide the capabilities to the agents. We could be using the smartest models in the world, but if the agents cannot interact with our data, with our services, with our systems, then the agent may be smart, but not capable. It is important that in order to unlock the agentic opportunity, yes, we choose the right model, but we also develop at the same time that ecosystem of MCP servers, that enables that agentic transformation to be real. And today, besides releasing the MCP governance capabilities, we also have released an auto-generation capability for MCP. So, we can take any RESTful API that already exists in the organization and we just a little YAML file, we can automatically generate an MCP server out of every RESTful API. And we do that to accelerate the time to market to creating smart agents that are capable. And we're also doing that to fundamentally improve developer productivity, without having to allocate R&D resources whenever we want to create MCP servers. Now, of course, in the organization there's going to be MCP servers that we built from scratch, but there is also going to be MCP servers that we can now, and the combination of both, IT is going to be determining how quickly the organization can go to market with capable and smart agents that actually do things.
Paul Nashawaty
>> So, this is important, right? Because when we look at capable and smart agents that actually do things, six months ago, a year ago, if somebody said that, would they basically know what their agents are doing today? I think that people looked at what agents are doing today, and they may not even known a year ago what these agents are capable of doing. As a vision area, looking at where this is all going, where do you see this going in the next three to five years?
Marco Palladino
>> Well, I think obviously agents are going to be integrating with more and more tools, more and more data sources. Agents are going to be fully connected with the whole enterprise environment. I think that, in a way, agents represent the next generation integration platform that organizations are going to be adopting to create that type of automation that in the years before was done by more heavyweight, if you want even legacy, ESBs or other technologies that really were born in the SOA space or the SOA world. Well, fast forward, it's 2025, almost 2026, that world is going away and agents are replacing it, and they're going to be the next nervous system of everything that the enterprise is doing. So, I'm very bullish on agents. I'm very bullish on the ability to generate agents in a quicker way by abstracting away the infrastructure requirements and I'm very bullish about exposing some of these agents to the customers that are now starting to use our products through the AI prompt, which in a way, you could think of the AI prompt as being the smartest browser in the world. It's the next universal interface. We're not going to be on WWW on our website anymore. We're going to be using an agent that autonomously can do work for us. It is the next browser, it is the next universal interface.
Paul Nashawaty
>> Oh, well, you heard it here, folks, first, it's going to be the next browsers. We're going to have agents doing this work for us. And actually, we're going to just talk to it. It's going to just do it for us. That's going to be pretty amazing. Well, I do believe that that frictionless is going to go away. We're going to remove that friction and make it easier for people to absorb and take this to the next generation. I do agree with you. Today, we need to have a human in the loop to get confidence. Tomorrow, automation will just allow and take over. We'll see how that goes. Marco, this has been amazing. What else did you want to leave you with the audience while we're here?
Marco Palladino
>> Well, everything that we announced today is available on our website konghq.com, including the open source Volcano SDK, as well as the AI Gateway 3.12. So, I encourage everybody to take a look at all the announcements we made today, because really, we are the cutting edge of AI infrastructure in the enterprise, Kong is. We were the first one to actually release an AI Gateway for the enterprise. And so, I think that everybody who's looking at the space and who's building the space is going to be quite excited about what we announced today.
Paul Nashawaty
>> Absolutely. I'm pretty excited about what you announced, and I don't live and build it every day. So, I think the audience is going to love it, really going to love it. Marco, thank you for being on today. This has been awesome having you on theCUBE and having your insights. It's really been great.
Marco Palladino
>> Thank you for the opportunity.
Paul Nashawaty
>> Thank you. And thank you for watching. My name is Paul Nashawaty. I'm coming to you live from the show floor at Kong API Summit 2025 on theCUBE, your leading source for tech news.
Paul Nashawaty