Can agent standards keep up with the companies building them?

At AGNTCon + MCPCon in San Jose, Mazin Gilbert, executive director of the Agentic AI Foundation, joins The New Stack’s Frederic Lardinois to discuss the rapid growth of agentic AI and the importance of open standards in shaping its future.

With 4,300 conference registrants and a rapidly expanding membership, the foundation is bringing together technology giants, startups, nonprofits and enterprises to address challenges around scalability, security, interoperability and governance. Gilbert explains how protocols like MCP are fueling a new economy of startups while enabling competing companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Microsoft, to collaborate on shared infrastructure.

The conversation explores the foundation’s approach to adopting new open source projects, expanding global participation through partnerships with organizations like the Gates Foundation, and encouraging meaningful community contributions. Gilbert also highlights emerging opportunities in agentic commerce, identity, trust, observability and physical AI.

Looking ahead, the foundation aims to accelerate standardization and expand its global community, ensuring agentic AI systems can scale securely without costly fragmentation.

Learn more from The New Stack around the latest developments around growth of agentic AI and the importance of open standards in shaping its future:

The Architect's Guide to Understanding Agentic AI 

The Agentic Web: How AI Agents Are Shaping the Web's Future 

Join our community of newsletter subscribers to stay on top of the news and at the top of your game.