MCP gateway as enterprise control plane
Augusto Marietti, CEO of Kong, on the end of tokenmaxxing
This marked the moment Kong’s AI gateway stopped being mostly about cheaper model calls and became enterprise control software for agent access. MCP turns plain APIs into tools an AI assistant can call in natural language, which creates a new layer of traffic to authenticate, log, rate limit, and inspect. Kong says enterprise adoption of its MCP gateway drove an 11x business expansion in eleven months, showing that governance demand arrived faster than full agent autonomy did.
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The concrete job of an MCP gateway is to sit in front of many MCP servers and handle the boring but critical enterprise work, identity, permissions, logs, analytics, and policy enforcement. That matters because a large company may expose thousands of internal systems to assistants, and each tool call can touch sensitive systems like Workday, ServiceNow, or internal data stores.
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This also explains why Kong separates itself from OpenRouter, Vercel, and Cloudflare. OpenRouter is mainly a marketplace for buying model access efficiently. Vercel and Cloudflare both offer AI gateways and now support MCP, but their center of gravity is still developer convenience and unified access. Kong is selling the behind the firewall control plane for enterprises with many internal APIs and stricter security needs.
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MCP became the wedge because enterprises are adopting AI assistants before they are ready for fully autonomous agents. Kong describes most current demand as internal tollgate usage, where companies want employees to safely use AI across existing systems. That is easier to budget and govern than letting agents run long multi step workflows on their own.
The next step is for the MCP gateway to become the default switchboard between enterprise systems and agent traffic. As more protocols emerge, including agent to agent and payments, the control point that already manages authentication, policy, and usage data will be in the best position to expand from traffic management into the system of record for how agents discover, access, and pay for enterprise tools.