Marco Palladino, CTO and co-founder of Kong, joins J.D. Durkin to discuss how agentic AI is reshaping enterprise infrastructure and why 2026 marks a turning point for autonomous systems.
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J.D.: Say hello to the great Marco Palladino. He is CTO and co-founder of Kong. Great to have you down here at The Big Board and on the show. Nice to have you.
Marco: Well, thanks for having me here.
J.D.: Can we start, first and foremost, a bit of an introduction to your work at Kong. For anyone who might not be too familiar, and what would you say are among your top priorities here in early, 2026?
Marco: Well, so I'm the CTO and co-founder of Kong. We are experts in building platforms for APIs and AI, and of course, our priority for 2026 is enabling our customers to take advantage of the agentic transformation.
J.D.: What does the agentic transformation mean for you? I've been hearing a lot more about agentic AI the last year. How much progress have we made towards that?
Marco: Well, organizations are building agents to transform their internal business processes, creating new revenue streams, creating new customer experiences. And in order to do that, they need a platform that can handle all of the connectivity that these agents are generating with the models, with the APIs, with their data. And that platform is what Kong provides.
J.D.: What are the main pain points that they're coming to you? They say, hey, artificial intelligence itself is great. We want the agentic version that can be a little bit more proactive on our tasks. What are those tasks and things they're telling you?
Marco: Well, they're asking us that they want to build agents that actually do things. in order for agents to do things, they need to get access to customer data and internal systems and services that the organization provides for their existing products.
Now, in order to expose these APIs to the agents, we have to expose them using new protocols, new technologies, new data governance challenges, new compliance rules that have to be in place in order for them to be successful with it. J.D.: This is all about the need for further AI connectivity. In your position, you got to kind of see where the puck is going to be. What are your expectations for how that conversation may continue to evolve here in 2026?
Marco: Well, 2026 is going to be the year of agentic AI. We spent half of the history of the internet building user interfaces for humans, who are going to be spending the next half of the internet to build user interfaces for machines. And these machines are agents that can autonomously complete outcomes and tasks without any human intervention whatsoever.
J.D.: What do you feel most separates Kong from other competitors in the space?
Marco: Well, Kong has been built for this new stack that's emerging. Everything we've been doing in the past when it comes to cloud native, when it comes to managing the SaaS, when it comes to managing microservices, that stack does not work in this new agenetic world, because AI and agenetic AI bring a whole new set of challenges in observability, in data governance, in security, such as those platforms, do not work very well here. Kong is different because we are building for this new, agentic world and we have done APIs for a decade, which is the natural evolution of APIs. It is agenetic AI.
J.D.: Marco, is there a need for further regulatory changes or things for lawmakers or policymakers out of Washington to sort of tweak, to continue to advance the conversation that Kong is situated in?
Marco: Well, we're seeing some regulations coming up. For example, the EU AI act, you know, is the regulations for highly regulated industries like finance and financial services and healthcare. And we all know that compliance is not going to get smaller from here. It's only going to get bigger. But it is for a good reason. We do not want to leak sensitive customer information and customer data and create damage to the end user. And so there's going to be more compliance, more regulatory pressure to make sure that the agents do what they're supposed to do without putting anybody at risk.
J.D.: I got less than a minute left. What have been some of the biggest lessons you've learned leading Kong through these various platform shifts so far? Marco: You got to keep innovating and never stop innovating because the world changes fast and you get to change with the world. Otherwise, you're going to be out of business.
J.D.: Marco Palladino is the CTO and co-founder of Kong. Congratulations on all the success. Thanks for being on the broadcast.
Marco: Thank you.
J.D.: Really good to have you.