AI Agents Will Automate Entire Enterprise Orgs | Marco Palladino

Marco Palladino (0:00)

If any organization can automate with agents, every function, the same way we've been automating R&D, think of the coding harnesses. Now imagine the IT organizations, the security teams, the legal teams, the HR, imagine everything running with agents. Well, the 100X productivity we're seeing in R&D we're going to be seeing across the organization, and no other human-based organization is ever going to be able to compete with an organization that leverages agents internally even to go and accomplish 100X more.

Sophia (0:29)

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to MTS. Today, we are joined with Marco Palladino. Marco is the co-founder and CTO of Kong, where he leads the development of connectivity infrastructure for AI applications. So really excited to talk to you Marco today on MTS, sharing all about the cool things you guys are announcing and what is next in store for Kong.

Marco Palladino (0:50)

I'm super excited to be here, Sophia.

Sophia (0:52)

Super excited to have you as well. I know a few weeks ago, you guys launched the volcano.dev platform. You also launched the API and the AI Summit. Tell me a little bit about what this actually is. What is that announcement? Why does it matter?

Marco Palladino (1:06)

Well, so volcano.dev, it is an agent cloud. Effectively, it is infrastructure for building agents right away from their coding harness all the way to production. So it's not about the building the code, it's about running the code and running it in production across pretty much all over the world.

Now, as you know, Kong is popular for our infrastructure software. Well, it turns out that our customers were asking us, it's great that we can process all of the AI traffic, the LLM traffic, the MCP traffic, and that's great. But can you help us? They're asking us, can you help us build the agents as well? And it turns out it is still quite complicated. Agents effectively change all the primitives, all the things that we need to use for building apps. They're a little bit different than traditional apps. There is new concepts that agents bring to the table. And so we're like, okay, you know what? Maybe we can solve for that. And that's when we decided to go and build Volcano.

Sophia (1:58)

Okay, so just to clarify, when you guys were talking to enterprises, they were sharing that, hey, my issue is not that these agents don't have the capabilities that they need. The issue is that I don't know how to connect all these different things together.

Is that correct?

Marco Palladino (2:14)

Correct, so let's take a step back.

A year ago, we do these yearly conferences for Kong, AI Summit, once a year. And last year, it was all about getting access to the latest and greatest intelligence. So if you remember, 12 months ago, everybody was chasing the latest models, the most intelligent model and so on and so forth. Well, 12 months later, that's not an issue anymore. When you look at frontier models like Opus 5, they have the equivalent IQ of 140 That's like a genius level. When you look at open weight models, they have an IQ, an equivalent IQ of 120, 130, which is still, by the way, above average in every American organization today. And I'm not the one, I don't want to offend anybody by saying this. It is just like how it is. There are studies and researchers that have quantified that. And so the hardest thing today, it is not to go and chase the latest and greatest model. We have plenty of intelligence. The hardest thing is, how do we go and deploy the intelligence? And so our customers were like, look, we have all these models available to us. We can use frontier models. We are starting to adopt open weight models to improve the spend and the costs and so on and so forth. But how can we go and build agents that actually allow us to take advantage of this intelligence and then being able to deploy it where it matters in the organization? So that is now the biggest challenge that every organization is facing. And of course, in my role as a CTO of Kong, I happen to speak with lots of CTOs and leaders across all of these organizations. And they were asking us, how can you help us build agents faster? Not only process their traffic once we have built them, but we have a challenge on building them to begin with.

And so we thought, okay, look, there is something that we can do here. We can provide a platform that is built for this world. It's built for the agentic world. It gives all the primitives, all the concepts of the dependencies that we need for this agentic world. And we can go and build from either a cloud code or cursor or codex or any coding harness from building to production, all the way to prod, straight off the bat. And so Volcano, if you look at what it provides, the platform, there is things like durable workflows and there is the sandboxes that we're about to announce. And then there is the whole concept of being able to manage an identity and authentication, being able to consume MCP tools and so on and so forth. So it truly brings everything that we need to build agents. And the goal is finally, we can build agents that can take advantage of that intelligence, take advantage of all the models that are available today and being able to finally transform our business using these new powerful technology. And so truly that's the goal for us here.