Persistent Systems and Kong have formed a strategic partnership to help enterprises move artificial intelligence into production by providing a unified control layer for application programming interfaces (APIs), data and AI services across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. The alliance pairs Persistent Systems' engineering-led delivery with Kong's unified API and AI connectivity platform to simplify integration, strengthen governance and accelerate AI adoption at scale. The companies say the collaboration positions Persistent as Kong's global systems integration partner. As enterprises transition from experimentation to production, the principal challenge is connecting, governing and operating AI systems rather than access to models. APIs, data pipelines, models and agents are described as converging into a single operational fabric that can fragment and become hard to govern without a unified control layer. The partners argue that implementing a governed, scalable connectivity layer will reduce complexity and improve the ability to scale high-performance workloads. The joint offering will enable organisations to modernise legacy API environments, enforce policy-driven safeguards and reduce operational costs while supporting workloads across hybrid and multi-cloud setups. It will support operationalisation of generative AI and agentic workflows, including architectures based on the Model Context Protocol, with built-in security, observability and centralised access management. The approach will include protection for personally identifiable information (PII), end-to-end observability and consistent policy enforcement across API and AI interactions. Persistent will combine its GenAI Hub and engineering capabilities with Kong's AI Gateway to deliver governed, production-grade AI systems that seek to lower risk and accelerate business value realisation. The partnership is presented as part of Persistent's AI-first, platform-driven strategy and as a path to move beyond isolated use cases to enterprise-scale execution. Persistent is a global digital engineering and enterprise modernisation company with over 27,500 employees in 21 countries and listings on Indian stock exchanges.