Filtering out hype from practical solutions is a major challenge in rapidly changing industries. My attention is automatically drawn to the development of new industry standards, since it means a group of people in the industry are working to define the future. AGNTCY is that group developing the new industry standard for AI Agents!
Industry Standards Overview
I personally have over a decade of experience in designing and implementing practical enterprise solutions, and industry standards tend to be where corporations place their focus. In fact, I held a role on a consortium developing a standard to support data interoperability in my industry. Unfortunately, that group I worked with cared more about politics than truly practical solutions, which is why I stepped down after five years. That experience gives me a healthy dose of skepticism, even if I’m actively supporting an effort to shape a standard to meet my organization’s long-term vision.
Pixar’s Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD) is a standard that I’ve been watching for a few years, which seems to continue to grow thanks to key players in the industry contributing to the specification. NVIDIA has played a huge part in moving USD into industrial applications like designing factories. They can leverage USD to build a virtual factory and even simulate the robots working on the floor to identify potential hazards that humans might run into before the factory is even built. That leads to massive cost savings by being able to alter the factory design before construction begins! I’m aiming for a USD focused project that I’ll document on this blog once I finally get there.
I’d personally vote for the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) to be the most successful group yet, having established several key web standards that ensure interoperability, accessibility, and a consistent user experience across devices and platforms. Here’s their list, which should sound familiar if you work with the web at all:
- HTML (HyperText Markup Language) – Defines the structure of web pages.
- CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) – Controls the presentation and layout of web content.
- JavaScript & Web APIs – Standards for dynamic content, interactivity, and browser APIs.
- Accessibility (WAI) – Guidelines to make web content accessible to all users, including WCAG.
- Semantic Web (RDF, OWL, SPARQL) – Standards for data sharing and interoperability.
- Web Security (TLS, CORS, CSP) – Protocols to enhance web security and privacy.
- Web Performance (WebAssembly, HTTP/2, PWA) – Technologies to improve speed and efficiency.
AGNTCY
With a goal of seamless, end-to-end agent-agent collaboration, this team is working to build what they call the Internet of Agents.
The AGNTCY is where we are building the Internet of Agents to be accessible for all: A diverse, collaborative space to innovate, develop, and maintain software components and services for agentic workflows and multi-agent applications.
AGNTCY is currently made up of some key players in the AI space with Cisco’s Outshift, LangChain, and Galileo as the initial core maintainers, and with Glean and LlamaIndex as contributors.
Out of those, I’m most familiar with LangChain. I’ve notice that LangChain plays and active role in contributing to open source projects. One of the coolest was the GenAI Stack they collaborated with Docker, Neo4j, and Ollama to build.
Having Cisco on their team is incredible, considering their history and experience!
When Cisco helped build the original Internet, we faced similar crossroads as some companies wanted to create closed, proprietary networks.
The stakes are even higher with AI.
This article contains their list of upcoming specs, which they say will have code dropping soon.
Discover
- Agent directory
- Registry for publishing and discovering agents
- Implements reputation tracking and quality metrics
- Open agent schema framework
- Defines standard metadata format for describing agent capabilities
- Includes verification mechanisms for agent providers
- Specification and reference implementation at github.com/agntcy/oasf
Compose
- Agent connect protocol and SDK
- Enables standardized communication between agents across frameworks
- Handles message passing, state management, and context sharing
- Specification available now at github.com/agntcy/acp-spec
To me, this plan is similar to a decentralized microservices architecture, tailored for AI workflows instead of traditional web services. That’s interesting considering that I’ve always seen AI solutions as individual services.
Stay Aware!
I’ll certainly be keeping an eye on this to see how this standard develops over time.
If this takes off with the masses, anyone NOT following the standard will be left in the dust with their agents unable to interact with other platforms.
Article Header Image
Made with Google’s ImageFX.
Prompt: “A cartoon scene of AI bots working together over a network to accomplish a common goal.”
