This session introduces the AI Gateway pattern—a central control plane for enterprise AI ecosystems. Explore how AI gateways solve real-world challenges through unified API abstraction, intelligent failover mechanisms, semantic caching, centralized guardrails, and granular cost controls. You'll learn practical architectural patterns for building high-availability gateways that handle thousands of concurrent requests while maintaining sub-millisecond decision-making through in-memory operations. The session covers separation of control and data planes, asynchronous logging patterns, and horizontal scaling strategies, with a look ahead to Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration for managing not just model access but entire tool ecosystems, enabling natural language automation across enterprise software.