API & AI Summit 2026 — AI Connectivity, Los Angeles

API & AI Summit 2026 (officially branded AI + API Summit) is Kong Inc.'s flagship two-day conference, held September 30 to October 1, 2026 at the InterContinental in Los Angeles, with an optional pre-event certification training day on September 29. Where many vendor conferences chase hype, Kong frames this one around a concrete and increasingly urgent problem: AI infrastructure is getting complicated, and the connective tissue between LLMs, agents, APIs and event streams is now where production systems succeed or fail. The summit is aimed squarely at the engineers, architects and technology leaders who run AI systems in production rather than those still in discovery mode. Programming is organized into focused tracks that map to the real operational concerns of the agentic era: AI Governance (governing LLM access, security and compliance), APIs for the AI Era (rebuilding API foundations for AI workloads), Real-Time AI with Event Streams (reactive agents on streaming data), Token Economics (managing and monetizing AI cost), and Context Engineering (connecting agents to production systems). Beyond the talk tracks, Agent Stack Labs offers hands-on, bring-your-laptop labs for builders, and the optional certification training (capped at 100 seats) provides instructor-led, credential-bearing instruction.

This matters now because the industry has moved past proof-of-concept chatbots into the harder territory of deploying autonomous agents safely at scale - questions of zero-trust security, observability, cost control and governance that the API-management community has spent a decade solving for traditional services are being urgently re-applied to LLM and agent traffic. Kong, as the maker of the widely used Kong Gateway and its newer AI Gateway, sits at the center of that shift, and the summit doubles as a venue for product launches and architecture deep-dives drawn from real deployments. The call for speakers (closed June 10, 2026) explicitly barred product pitches and company overviews, soliciting instead practitioner stories on AI systems in production, scalable multi-cloud infrastructure, API and developer-platform architecture, security and zero-trust, observability and reliability, and platform engineering - a curatorial stance that keeps the content technical. Session formats run short and dense: 25-minute breakouts, fireside chats and panels, plus 60-minute hands-on workshops. The agenda also features non-technical headline programming; the 2026 featured speaker is writer, actor and comedian Kumail Nanjiani.

Attendees should expect keynotes, deep technical sessions, the labs and structured networking, with full virtual access bundled into in-person tickets. This is a strong fit for platform engineers, API and infrastructure architects, AI/ML engineers building agentic systems, security and governance leads, and engineering managers weighing the cost and reliability trade-offs of running generative AI at enterprise scale. For anyone responsible for the unglamorous-but-critical plumbing that determines whether an AI initiative actually ships and stays up, the summit's production-first orientation distinguishes it from the broader, more speculative AI conference circuit.