Kong API Summit '25 | Reza Shafii, Kong

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Reza Shafii

Sr. VP Product

Kong

play_circle_outline Introduction of Paul Nashawaty and Reza at Kong API Summit 2025.

play_circle_outline KAi announced as a copilot for Konnect, highlighting its significance.

play_circle_outline Unlocking Digital Transformation: The Critical Role of Reliable, Secure, and Discoverable APIs in Successful AI Implementation

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Reza Shafii, Kong

Reza Shafii

Sr. VP Product Kong

At the Kong API Summit 2025, Reza Shafii, senior vice president of product at Kong, joins theCUBE’s Paul Nashawaty to unpack how the convergence of AI and APIs is moving from hype to reality. Shafii shares details from the keynote, including KAi, Kong’s copilot for Konnect, and new MCP server support designed to simplify how agentic applications weave LLM context with secure, reliable and discoverable APIs. He explains how solid API foundations accelerate AI initiatives and breaks down how AI Composer and Runner can stitch multiple backend APIs into a single ... Read more

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Paul Nashawaty

>> Hello and welcome back to Kong API Summit 2025. My name is Paul Nashawaty, and I'm coming to you live from the show floor of the event here today. I'm the practice director, practice leader. What am I today? I don't know, I'm just... whatever. I'm making up titles as I'm going through this, that's how I'm doing it. But I'm the practice leader and I focus on app dev and app modernizsation. I'm joined today by Reza. How you doing?

Reza Shafii

>> Hey, Paul.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Great to have you on.

Reza Shafii

>> Yeah, same here.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. Do you want to tell the audience a little bit about yourself and what you do?

Reza Shafii

>> Yeah, am the SVP of product at Kong, so I lead all product portfolio. And I like to call myself, the term is outdated now, but middleware geek. So, I've been in the middleware world since BAE Systems and Oracle and MuleSoft and I'm now at Kong, and Red Hat of course, and it's been great. I love this place.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, it's great. And you know what? I think the expansion and what's been happening... The show floor has been amazing. I think the keynote was really exciting. The conversations that we're having here is just really, really powerful.

Reza Shafii

>> Well, I think the convergence of the AI, which obviously that's the big talk, and APIs is really coming to reality. And I think people are feeling that connection between the two is really important. Yes.

Paul Nashawaty

>> I agree. I agree. I think that watching the keynote and watching what's happening in my practice, in the app dev practice, I cover application development, modernization. And a lot of what I focus in on is the past, present and future of applications and what they're doing. And a lot of organizations are trying to modernize, they're trying to bridge the gap between heritage environments, the new environments. So, I was really excited to see your announcements during the keynote. One thing that was very interesting to me was KAi. KAi was one of the announcements, a copilot for Konnect. I think that was really, really cool. But there was a lot of product announcements, like a lot of things, but using natural language for one, using the MCP service, we had a number of guests on and talking about the MCP service, which I think is incredibly important to talk about as well, but a lot of this is important.

Reza Shafii

>> Yeah. So, what I think is interesting about KAi is I like to say we drank our own champagne, and what I mean by that is we've been saying for a long time that APIs are a foundation to many things. Having solid APIs, so having secure, reliable discoverable APIs is the key to make a lot of things go well. Digital transformation, if you talk six years ago, integrations, open banking, all of these initiatives depend on a solid API link. And what I find interesting is now AI is the big shiny object that everybody's chasing and wants to be successful in AI, but guess what? APIs still really matter so much. If you have basically had your API foundation solidified, you're suddenly in this amazing position where you can go much faster in establishing the AI initiatives. And if you have not, then you're going to find out very quickly that you need to. So, yeah.

Paul Nashawaty

>> So, let's just double-click on that real quick because I think it's important to understand a lot of organizations are in various stages of their maturity. They're either very mature, they understand where they fully get it, they know what they're doing or they're not even sure how to get started in doing this. But one of the things that you talked about was your MCP server support. The MCP support allows you to harmonize these API calls. Would you agree?

Reza Shafii

>> Yeah. So, assuming you have that solid foundation of let's say solid APIs, like reliable, secure, discoverable APIs, then, okay, now what is MCP right? Now, I think what's interesting with MCP is that as we're building applications with agentic capabilities, you're going to still make normal API calls and now you're going to make calls to LLMs. As you make calls to LLMs, you need to have that additional context to feed these LLMs just the right information and to be able to get them to do things. And so, that's where MCP comes in and it's really a layer on top of services. Now, these services, of course, we know they can be database calls or file calls, but most often, they're going to be API calls. And so, it becomes a weaving together of the right APIs into the actual clients, which is now agentic or AI-native, however you want to put it, just feeding the right context. So, to me, it becomes an AI integration problem because suddenly integrating LLMs with APIs in just the right way. So, that's how it comes back-

Paul Nashawaty

>> But what I thought was interesting was the reduction in complexity, I think that's important. Because what we find is skill gaps an issue, we find that that's a challenge with the lot organizations. And because of that challenge, organizations are reluctant to get started on something, but what you've done with this MCP support is you neutralized that.

Reza Shafii

>> Yeah, so with the stuff that we just announced and also what we're going to announce tomorrow, what you can do is take an API, make an MCP server right away that's secure. And what we're going to talk about is AI Composer and Runner, which is you can actually weave together backend APIs, multiple tools into a single tool. Let's say you have an API for all of your product usage data, an API for your actual customer support information, and then a API for your product requests. You can create a tool on the fly that says all of these APIs should be a tool that tells you the customer sentiment. That would take I would say 20 to 30 minutes, at most, to create and make available on Konnect. Yes, we're decreasing complexity quite a bit.

Paul Nashawaty

>> I think it's amazing. I think that's awesome because that's what I'm seeing as a major barrier. So, let's talk a couple of the other announcements. You mentioned security. You mentioned errors. One of the things that we haven't talked about on the interviews a lot today was a Kong Identity. Kong Identity was an announcement that came out. Let's talk a little bit about that.

Reza Shafii

>> So, we see a lot of our customers have the challenge where they are protecting APIs and this can be MCP servers or non-MCP servers, all the APIs are still around and they need machine-to-machine identity. Yes, you can address that through existing IDPs you might have, but because you're right there and you're trying to protect these APIs in Konnect, which for us, Konnect is the platform for API and developer platform builders, it just makes sense for it to all just be seamlessly integrated into the experience. So, I want to come in, I want to protect this API, I want to protect this AI endpoint. Let's make sure that I have access to an identity provider baked into Konnect that's basically providing me access to my client identity.

Paul Nashawaty

>> I mean human and non-human identity management is incredibly important, especially when you talk about the lifeline of the business. Data is the lifeline of the business. So, if you have access and you're opening up things, this is one of the big challenges I see in my practices, the fact that you have these heritage systems, the way the systems were built in the past were protected in the security and elements around it was built around how that you bundle with the system. The minute you extract that information out, now you have gaps.

Reza Shafii

>> Well, actually, with the MCP world, now you're getting another set of gaps because what happens is that when an API is called, usually let's say you're the person using the app, you're making the call, right? Well, we know that Paul made the call to the API because that's part of the authentication. What is happening is people are building agents and it's so easy to build them in some ways, and they need that agent to do things. Now, is that agent Paul or is that agent someone else? And often, these agents need full access, like super user access. So, what ends up happening is they go trade a user that has full system access, they give that identity to the agent, and the agent basically impersonates the super user. So, you can see how this could be pretty dangerous for-

Paul Nashawaty

>> For sure. Well, not only just dangerous, I mean you have reputation, compliance, regulation issues, but you also have these new rules going into effect. Take for example the EUCRA, that's going into effect as of December 2027, right?

Reza Shafii

>> That's right.

Paul Nashawaty

>> And reporting going into effect September 2026. If you're not complying to those rules, there is some severe penalties.

Reza Shafii

>> Yeah. So, these are real pain points that people are having right now and what we're trying to do is make sure we have all the capabilities, so that they can move fast, but not shoot themselves in the foot. That's the-

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, I think that's good. It's like move fast, innovate. We're seeing in our research that organizations want to release code on an hourly basis. 24% of our organizations have responded, want to release code on an hourly basis. So, if they're moving that fast, mistakes can happen. So, you're putting safeguards in place so those mistakes don't happen, I think that's important to note. So, let's talk about Konnect service catalog. Okay, there's this concept of the service catalog. How is that being released, delivered? What does that look like?

Reza Shafii

>> Yeah, so the catalog is really, the way I like to think about it is if you go to a grocery store, you have all of the items published in just the perfect light with just the right lighting, all that stuff, that's your developer portal. That's where you want all the developers to go in and find the right API or the right MCP servers or the right events, APIs, whatever you want to publish, register for it, access it. But behind every grocery store, there's an entire supply chain of items and that needs to be inventoried, so you know which items go to which store, all that stuff. The catalog is really that. It's this your system of record for all of your APIs, all of your services, east-west services, all of your MCP servers and more in the future.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Love it. Love it. Yeah, that's great. That takes us to the next segment where we want to think about how APIs are shaping up the agentic AI implementations. That's a big part of what the future is looking like. What are your thoughts?

Reza Shafii

>> Well, it goes back to there is this foundational need for building agents, which is an LLM is brilliant on its own, but it can't do things. And it's very hard for it to retrieve on-the-fly, real-time information. So, basically, long story short, if the LLMs are the brain, the APIs are the limbs, are the eyes, are the sensory elements. And if they're not solid, guess what? The AI is going to misbehave. The brain is going to misbehave. It doesn't matter how brilliant it is, if you can't see properly, if you can't move your hand properly, you're not going to be as powerful.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Right. Yeah, that makes sense. Makes sense. So, all this to say, as we're closing out the session, how is this really impacting Kong's roadmap and where's that going in the future?

Reza Shafii

>> Well, to us, it's always been about the same thing, which is we want to first and foremost empower builders to go fast. To go fast and innovate, so that's mission number one. And so, we're building the tools to enable application builders to go really fast, infrastructure builders to go really fast. And at the same time, enable the platform builders to provide a platform for these builders to be creative while they have full governance and understand what's going on, so that we don't end up getting ourselves into trouble, which we tend to do in IT sometimes. So, that's what Konnect is, really it's empower the builders, build strong while their platform builders have control.

Paul Nashawaty

>> I love it. I love it. The stat that I've been hearing and I see it in my research is only a third of the time the developers are spending writing code, two thirds of their time they're in maintenance mode. Sounds like you have that solved. You're fixing it.

Reza Shafii

>> Right, the fast tracks. That's right.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, that's fantastic. Reza, it's been really great having you on theCUBE. It's a great event. I'm really excited to be on it.

Reza Shafii

>> It's a pleasure. Thank you very much.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Thank you. Thank you. And I am Paul Nashawaty and I'm coming to you live from the show floor at Kong API Summit 2025 on theCUBE, your leading source for tech news.