Sovereign DevOps-driven governance. Put together like this may sound odd. Governance means a lot of rules, documents or a review board. DevOps is what make your teams work experience good. Finally, sovereign usually is about controlling your infrastructure and tooling choices. Together, governance stops being a manual blocker of change but becomes a part of it. Nowadays, that matters more than ever, as your next API consumer won’t be a human. An agent won’t figure out what is not written. It won’t ask your colleague on slack. It will do exactly what your contract or similar documents say.

In this talk, I will show how to make API governance part of the DevOps process. Using open-source tools and CI/CD pipelines, we can automatically check whether APIs follow company standards, are AI-ready, catch breaking changes early, keep APIs catalogued, and reduce drift between guidelines and what teams actually deliver.

I will also show how to put in place a bare-bones, no-fuss governance setup in just a few hours, one that brings value quickly without becoming a big governance initiative. Finally, I will show how to treat AI agents as first-class citizens, so APIs are designed to be understandable and safe to use not only for developers, but also for agent-based consumers.