UPDATED 17:05 EDT / OCTOBER 14 2025

Augusto Marietti, co-founder, chief executive officer and president at Kong Inc. discusses AI traffic and AI’s convergence - Kong API Summit: The API Summit for the Agentic Era AI

API traffic meets AI agents: Why the control plane demands centralized control

Application programming interfaces and artificial intelligence used to sit on opposite sides of the enterprise; one wiring apps together and the other making them smarter. Now, API traffic is where they are set to converge at scale.

As agentic AI enters the workforce, APIs have become the guardrails for models as much as for microservices. That puts API and AI traffic on a collision — and integration — course, making governance one problem instead of two, according to Augusto Marietti (pictured), co-founder and chief executive officer of Kong Inc.

Augusto Marietti, co-founder, chief executive officer and president at Kong Inc. discusses API traffic and unified control planes at Kong API Summit: The API Summit for the Agentic Era

Kong’s Augusto Marietti talks with theCUBE about API traffic and the importance of a unified control plane.

“The big bet is API traffic and AI traffic will converge,” he said. “[Which makes] it more important than ever to have a unified API and AI platform that manages both types of traffic.”

Marietti spoke with theCUBE’s Paul Nashawaty at the Kong API Summit: The API Summit for the Agentic Era, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the convergence of API traffic with AI traffic and the broader implications for the industry. (* Disclosure below.)

Where API traffic meets token traffic

For teams building and running systems, the unit of work is changing: They still ship requests between services, but now they also account for tokens that carry context for agents and models. That makes agents and large language learning models first-class consumers on the same rails as APIs, turning discovery, governance and spend into shared problems across both domains, Marietti noted.

“I think this massive dramatic shift [is] an inflection point where it’s all about API traffic,” he said “It’s about building an API platform, but now we’re moving from API calls to tokens. How we move intelligence is through tokens and those tokens get moved and consumed through APIs and agents. It’s a whole different era.”

For Kong, the practical angle for a unified control plane in this new era is interoperability over ideology. The approach is to support whatever stack a customer has today and pull it under one management plane so security, discoverability and metering don’t fragment, according to Marietti.

“The world is at [a] different stage of evolution,” he said. “So is our customer, our partners – you want to meet them where they are. Some people are still on mainframe with a wrapper API on top – that’s fine; We have the gateway for that. Some folks run entirely on whatever AWS – we have the gateway for that. Others are full-on event streaming with Kafka – we’ve got the gateway for that. Others are entirely LLM- and agent-driven teams – we have the AI gateway for that.”

Operationally, Kong argues that costs and control hinge on tracing work from request to token. A single traffic layer creates one place to see and govern how API activity drives LLM usage. That linkage enables more accurate metering and budgeting across models, and a single point to apply guardrails and rate limits, according to Marietti. It also simplifies incident response by correlating spikes in model usage with specific APIs, clients and agents.

“We can see the whole traffic,” Marietti said. “We can always give a universal observability from an API call to a token in the same platform. That’s the big push right now for the unified view.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Kong API Summit event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Kong API Summit. Neither Kong Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Support our mission to keep content open and free by engaging with theCUBE community. Join theCUBE’s Alumni Trust Network, where technology leaders connect, share intelligence and create opportunities.

  • 15M+ viewers of theCUBE videos, powering conversations across AI, cloud, cybersecurity and more
  • 11.4k+ theCUBE alumni — Connect with more than 11,400 tech and business leaders shaping the future through a unique trusted-based network.
About SiliconANGLE Media
SiliconANGLE Media is a recognized leader in digital media innovation, uniting breakthrough technology, strategic insights and real-time audience engagement. As the parent company of SiliconANGLE, theCUBE Network, theCUBE Research, CUBE365, theCUBE AI and theCUBE SuperStudios — with flagship locations in Silicon Valley and the New York Stock Exchange — SiliconANGLE Media operates at the intersection of media, technology and AI.

Founded by tech visionaries John Furrier and Dave Vellante, SiliconANGLE Media has built a dynamic ecosystem of industry-leading digital media brands that reach 15+ million elite tech professionals. Our new proprietary theCUBE AI Video Cloud is breaking ground in audience interaction, leveraging theCUBEai.com neural network to help technology companies make data-driven decisions and stay at the forefront of industry conversations.

Cookies

We employ the use of cookies. Find out more.