Kong Maintains Lead in Gartner API Management Quadrant for Seventh Year

The recognition highlights a pivotal shift in enterprise infrastructure, where AI tokens are rapidly becoming a dominant component of API traffic. Internal data from Kong reveals that AI-related traffic has expanded sevenfold over the past nine months. Despite this growth, less than 1% of organizations currently utilize AI-specific governance controls, creating a significant security and management gap that Kong aims to close through its unified connectivity layer.

CEO Augusto Marietti emphasized that the company’s evolution centers on governing agents, models, and APIs within a single control plane. This strategy is embodied in the recent launch of Kong AI Gateway 2.0, which adds capabilities for identity-aware AI policies, cost management, and secure tool access. By extending traditional API governance frameworks to cover AI workloads, Kong seeks to provide the observability and compliance necessary for production-grade AI deployments across diverse cloud environments.