Building the Foundation for the Agentic AI Era

How do we build an AI ecosystem where agents, tools, and systems can work together at scale? Angie Jones, VP of the Agentic AI Foundation, joins Chris to discuss the open standards and projects shaping the agentic future, including MCP, A2A, Goose, etc. They also explore what it takes to drive AI adoption across an entire organization, the importance of neutral standards, global perspectives on agentic AI, and how humans can find the right balance between what they delegate to AI and what they do themselves. Featuring: Angie Jones – LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/angiejones/, X https://x.com/techgirl1908Chris Benson – Website https://chrisbenson.com/, LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisbenson, Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/chrisbenson.bsky.social, GitHub https://github.com/chrisbenson, X https://x.com/chrisbensonLinks: Agentic AI Foundation https://aaif.io/Sponsors: Framer: The enterprise-grade website builder that lets your team ship faster. Get 30% off at framer.com/practicalai http://framer.com/practicalaiPrediction Guard: A self-hosted AI control plane for running agents in high impact environments. predictionguard.com/practicalai https://predictionguard.com/practicalaiResources and Events: Register for upcoming webinars here https://practicalai.fm/webinars! Prior Webinars from our partner Prediction Guard https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRpRdFmBfdF6boDgAD3nNaLm8Yx4KN2VtMidwest AI Summit 2026 https://midwestaisummit.com/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Practical AI Podcast, where we break down the real world applications of artificial intelligence and how it's shaping the way we live, work, and create. Our goal is to help make AI technology practical, productive, and accessible to everyone. Whether you're a developer, business leader, or just curious about the tech behind the buzz, you're in the right place. Be sure to connect with us on LinkedIn, X, or Blue Sky to stay up to date with episode drops, behind-the-scenes content, and AI insights. You can learn more at practicalai.fm. Now, onto the show.

• 0:41Chris Benson?

  Hey, welcome to another edition of the Practical AI Podcast. I am your co-host, going solo today. I'm Chris Benson. Daniel's not with me this time, but we have an excellent conversation coming up for you. With me today, I have Angie Jones, who is the Vice President of the Agentic AI Foundation, which I think is a super cool title to have, at a super cool name place. And I'm really looking forward to finding out more about it. Angie, welcome to the show.

• 1:11Speaker 02

  Thanks so much, Chris.

• 1:12Chris Benson?

  So, like I said there in the intro, and I said it before the show started and stuff, like if somebody in AI was looking for a play like the Agentic, I mean, like, that is the coolest sounding thing you can have. And but before we dive too far into the foundation, I'd really like to kind of hear, like, how does someone, like, how do you develop in your career so that you end up doing that? Like, could you tell us a little bit about your background? Because that's a, that, you know, that's like, that's one of those things, if you, if you went and just said something to, like, I work with tons of people working on Agentic AI, but like, leading the foundation of Google, so I'm just curious, like, how do you get to that point?

• 1:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I'm your traditional techie. So I've worked as an engineer for a couple of decades. So, you know, at places like IBM and Twitter. And the last role was at Block in an engineering leadership capacity. And so in that role, one of my tasks was to basically teach the entire company, 12,000 people, how to use AI agents. And this is as I'm learning myself, because, I mean, there's no book for this, you know, right out the gate. And that was early, like, 2024. So a lot of this stuff was brand new. It was not even common in tech, let alone in others' verticals, right?

• 2:43Speaker 02

  And so I also like lead developer relations. And so a big part of my role is helping developers worldwide understand new technologies and how to use them. And so our company, Block, created like this internal AI agent named Goose. And Goose, we were, the developers were using Goose to like automate engineering tasks, help with coding and things like that. And so we were teaching developers across the globe, what is an AI agent? Like, we were very early in this. And so Jack Dorsey, who leads Block, was like, hey, Angie, you're teaching like everybody else about agents.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  I really would love for everyone in this company to learn how to use agents. And so I'm talking finance, marketing, like, you know, design, HR, everyone needed to learn about AI and more specifically, how to utilize agents. And so me and the team went like really deep on this. And then it got to the point, like, pretty AI-fluent company where everyone is comfortable using this. I needed to go really deep on the engineering org. And so that was my home. Our engineers were using this, but we weren't seeing a big difference in like developer velocity, for example, right?

• 4:11Speaker 02

  And so we explored that and learned that, you know, we're only at the tip of the iceberg. We really could do a whole lot more to get to this autonomous engineering org, right? And so I pretty much drank from the firehose of like all of the news, all of the releases, everything that's going out. And I consumed that, kind of filter out a lot of the noise, and then bring the things that are valuable to the engineers. And so I would say like, I know a lot about the space. And also, at my time at Block, I worked on a protocol. So this was like a cross-border money movement protocol. So those who don't know Block, that's the company, the finance tech

• 4:54Speaker 02

  company that houses Square and Cash App, right? So money is our jam. So I worked on this protocol. Never thought I would be a protocol girl, but learned a lot about like, just kind of open standards and how all of that works as well. Also, really big in open source throughout my career. I've always like believed in open source, contribute to open source, like advocate for it, right? So all of that kind of came together in this perfect storm as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Block wanted to form a foundation for Agentic AI. They understood that, hey, some of these standards, some of these open source projects

• 5:39Speaker 02

  that we're coming up with, we probably shouldn't be the sole authors or owners of these things, right? MCP is a great example. So MCP is the Model Context Protocol. This is what agents use to connect to applications and tools, right? Which we saw across Block. Everyone in Block needed MCP service to connect to whatever applications they were using. And so like Anthropic realized, yeah, this probably should live in a neutral home. And so those three companies came together to form the Agentic Foundation under the Linux Foundation. So Linux Foundation's been around for decades, everyone knows them. And so, yeah, so this is a new foundation. So, once we stood this up,

• 6:25Speaker 02

  me and our head of open source came over to the foundation. And, and we thought it was so cool. We started working here full-time.

• 6:35Chris Benson?

  Very cool. And I like the Jack Dorsey name drop there. That was, that's pretty good. Like, so you actually, you were actually working directly with him as well along the way?

• 6:46Speaker 02

  In our CTO. Yeah, that's right. So I worked with Jack at Twitter. And then he brought me over to Block when they, when they started developing like these open source projects and protocols.

• 6:58Chris Benson?

  Very cool. I want to back up for a moment because I got a couple of questions from things that you brought up there. And one is, is the education? Because I think educating the organizations that folks were in, like, like you were, you know, pathfinding along the same kind of task that, that a lot of organizations are trying to do right now. And that is, you know, especially, like, every year recently, but especially 2026, has been just insanely, you know, fast in terms of the, you know, the level of progress and the onset of Agentic's, you know, they were there last year, but this year it just has taken over the world. And so like, every org is dealing with that now. And you have taken point

• 7:42Chris Benson?

  on this notion of education, not just for developers, but for, you know, the whole org and, and kind of parts of the org that maybe people aren't thinking about as much because they tend to be very focused on developers. Can you talk a little bit about what creating that kind of change looks like in terms of? And I'm going to separate. I want to ask about the non-developers first. Like, when you're going into finance and, and you're going into these other, these other organizational departments that have, that are not thinking about the bits and bytes of AI all the time? And, and, and you're trying to say, here's a new tool. And like, how do you approach that? Not, not only from the upskilling

• 8:26Chris Benson?

  that's required, but also from the, kind of the, like, getting people to accept it? Because, I mean, you know, you see, like, people out there, there's a lot of resistance to AI in the general population out there. And so like, how, how do you navigate that when you're, when you're, when you're trying to move the org forward like that?

• 8:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, these were two very big and different challenges, right? So one is the whole change management of it all. Like, you're essentially asking people to think differently and do their jobs differently. These are experts in their domains, right? Who, who've maybe been doing this a couple of decades. And you're like, oh, kind of throw away like your processes and everything, and we want you to do this. Not only that, to your point, resistance, right? Fear, lots of different emotions involved in that. And then the whole technical part of it, where like these tools, like I said, this was very early on, 2024, 2025.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  You didn't have these nice desktop applications. You had a CLI, right? You were copying JSON to like get an MCP server working. Like, this was foreign to folks who like don't use these tools every day. So it was a really big job. Um, and, and so like you have to consider all of that. It's not just, hey, let me show you how to use a terminal, right? Um, it's helping them understand where they still fit into the process, right? With things, it's okay to let that go. Like you probably should not be doing this anymore because it's not a good use of your time anymore. Right? Um, and then also I, I like to say there's people on both spectrums.

• 10:12Speaker 02

  There's people that, you know, they think AI is the best thing ever and can do all the things. And there's other people who are like, oh, AI is stupid. It can't do anything. I like to kind of be in the middle there where, you know, I can be realistic about its strengths, its weaknesses, um, what I should use it for and what I shouldn't use it for. And just leading with that helped a lot because I'm not trying to get you to drink Kool-Aid. Right? I'm saying, hey, here's a different approach that could speed you up. Right? Um, that can also give you access to a lot of stuff that maybe you didn't have before. And that part was the key. So when there's, there's, let's say data, right?

• 10:56Speaker 02

  Um, everybody needs data, no matter what role you're in. Um, if I say, hey, listen, I can get you access with this agent and be like some MCP server to let's say, uh, records that are in this database that you would have had to go to another team, put in a request and ask for a report, right? And then try to figure that report out yourself. I can get you that data in seconds so that you can go in like do your best work. So people are like sold on that kind of thing, right? So you take them step by step and give them things that, uh, are meaningful to them that might not be their core job. So just so they could get used to it and they could start building some trust, right?

• 11:40Speaker 02

  And then eventually they start delegating a little bit more and a little bit more, um, until they find that right spot of, okay, I shouldn't delegate this. The AI does not do well like that. That part I'll take, right? So that was my, my overall approach to it.

• 11:57Chris Benson?

  I, I really like that. And when I know when I get in conversations with folks, uh, about this topic, um, one of the things that I often say, which I think is, is kind of resonating with, with your, your story there is that like find the place where the human has a distinct advantage from the AI and differentiate the, the AI, you know, go down through the job requirements and find what, where the human is, is still better at this point. And that may be fluid, you know, that may change over time depending on, on that. So like having, having an open mind, uh, is good. But I think, I think that's incredible advice, uh, that you're giving people in terms of like how to navigate, because I think that's one of the biggest questions that people, that people have out there based on the conversations I'm having.

• 12:42Chris Benson?

  To flip to the other side of the coin, when you're dealing with developers and you're, and it's like even as, and I'm a lifelong developer. I've been doing it for decades, uh, and I see, you know, and I, you know, every day on, on social media and stuff, I see people, um, you see the developers that are embracing Agentic fully and they're, they're orchestrating. And then you see the ones that are like, oh, it still sucks. And then, you know, I'm, I'm still, you know, you know, all that stuff. And like, and how, what was your experience as you dived into the pool of developers trying to, to get the embrace going here?

• 13:16Speaker 02

  So for a while, um, if we look back, so back then you're like, oh, this is great. But it wasn't that great, right? I mean, and, and there, there in the early days, it was good for that time. But compared to now, it was, it's not. And so developers who would like maybe try, um, the tools and they didn't do a great job. You ask it to write a feature or something. It's like, what? This is stupid, you know? Um, those developers, I found once they tried it once, if it didn't work out well, they kind of threw their hands up. Um, and it wasn't until like end of maybe 2025, when the like, uh, was it four?

• 14:01Speaker 02

  Like Sonic four, five or four, six? I don't even remember the versions anymore, but it was like this point in about November of 2025.

• 14:09Chris Benson?

  That was it.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  The models just felt really good. Um, but we couldn't wait until then. Like I had a mandate to like get everybody using AI and to increase developer velocity. And so what I did, thinking back to that change management and I, it was too much of a lift to get, it's 3,500 developers to, to lift everyone at the same time. Especially when you have all of these emotions involved and you have this resistance, right? And I would say like, we had quite a few people who were resistant to this. So what I did instead, there's this, this rule. Um, it's called the, the one nine ninety rule.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  And this rule essentially says that in any community, there's going to be 1% of that community that are creators. Think about like social media, anything like that. You'll have nine percent that, you know, they'll dabble here and there, the tinkerers, if you will. And then the, the 90, the bulk of people are consumers, right? Um, and so I said, if I look at our engineering organization through that lens, let me go and put together the one percent. And so I went across the org and I pulled people and they didn't necessarily have to be the, the drunk off the Kool-Aid, like AI peeled people.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  Um, but I just needed representation from every major repo that we had. Um, you know, our largest ones, our critical ones. Uh, I wanted people from various teams, different types of repos as well. So I needed front end and back end and mobile, iOS and Android. You know, I needed these people. And so I did this little week long campaign, just going across the org. These people don't necessarily, I'm not their first line manager, right? So I need to get buy-in from their first line manager. That's a totally different conversation because a lot of them weren't even bought into this. Right? Um, but I say, hey, listen, you know, you have this mandate. You gotta get people to use AI on your team.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  Give me one person, um, that I can have 30% of their time. And what I want to do is, one, they all come together. We learn all of this stuff, but it's not just for them. What I need them to do is build that knowledge back into the systems themselves so that your entire team benefits from this, right? And so they were there with me. We're drinking, it was 50 of them, um, drinking from the fire hose, trying things out. Because things are changing so quickly. There's so much noise. You don't know what'll work, what won't work, right? Everything looks great on Twitter in a little demo.

• 17:00Speaker 02

  But we're working with huge, you know, mono repos with, you know, hundreds of services in them, like, you know, we're working with people's money. You know, these are enterprise systems that you have to approach this a bit differently and much more carefully. And so they would try things out. We'll see things, we'll try them. Some things will work for maybe a specific type of repo. Like, okay, this works great on, uh, web, sucks for mobile, right? We can't use that technique. But together, the 50 of us were able to like try a lot of things, figure out what works. Maybe I do have something that works on my iOS repo. Hey, other iOS repos, here's what I figured out, right?

• 17:46Speaker 02

  And then, like I said, embed this stuff into the system. So things like context engineering techniques, things like, you know, agent MD files and, and agent skills and all of that baked into the repo. So that no matter who was pointing their agent at this repo, the agent could work the way that your team wanted it to work because it was baked into the system. So we didn't have to, you know, teach everybody how to do this. These champions essentially did that for them and filtered out the noise for their team. So they would bring back the things that actually work, that are tried and true. And then they would do a brown bag session or something with their team. Like, let me show you guys what I put in the repo and why it's working for you all of a sudden. You know?

• 18:30Speaker 02

  Um, so that, that was the technique, uh, that we used there and it worked really, really well.

• 18:37Chris Benson?

  Sometimes as a business owner, it's so hard to put out quality material and content that looks handcrafted and human, but yet still use appropriate tools and automation and AI to make that fast to ship. That's why I appreciate so much what our partner Framer is doing. Framer is the pro website builder for creators, teams and businesses that want a professional site and care enough to get every detail right. But that can't come at the price of endless to-do lists and long, long development processes. You need to make that happen fast, which is why Framer has integrated agents directly into

• 19:18Chris Benson?

  their platform that work right alongside the teams creating the site. You can learn more about Framer and learn how to get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com/practicalai for 30% off a Framer Pro Annual Plan. That's framer.com/practicalai for 30% off. framer.com/practicalai. Rules and restrictions may apply. So that is super cool. I'm going to borrow your techniques myself. I bet a few other folks listening or watching will do the same. Really insightful there in terms of how

• 20:02Chris Benson?

  to approach that. As you arrived, having gone through a lot of this and you arrive at the Agentic AI Foundation now, and it's brand new as an organization, you're standing it up, you're taking on the responsibilities. Could you talk a bit about like, what was it like to get the foundation going and get it focused and get the right people and know that you were doing the things that needed and what those are?

• 20:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. So this Agentic AI Foundation was formed end of 2025. So it's been what, about eight or nine months at this point. Lots of excitement, right? We had dozens of companies that were interested in being a part because everyone sees the need for this. Everyone is also innovating at lightning speed. There's so much innovation that's happening right now. And if you have anything that you're creating that's like, you know, oh, this, we don't have this figured out. We need a new standard for this. No one wants

• 21:10Speaker 02

  that standard being cooked in one kitchen, right? If we're talking about Agentic Commerce, for example, PayPal doesn't want Stripe figuring that out by themselves, right? They want to work together or they need to work together and they know they need to work together. And so what the Agentic AI Foundation has done is provided this neutral home where all of these various companies can come and have these conversations together. So we have working groups essentially where the members, they've, okay, which working group do you want to be a part of? And there's so many of them. There's like, like I said, the Agentic Commerce, right? So if you're figuring out how agents are going to buy

• 21:50Speaker 02

  stuff on the web, all right, I need, I need these, I need PayPal, I need Stripe, I need, you know, all of these various companies together and they work on these standards together. I like to think of it as they are defining the rules of the game and creating the game board together. And once they have that figured out, it's like, all right, now we can compete. Deal, you know, deal me in, right? And so that's what the Agentic Foundation does. It also houses those standards or those projects. So right now, the projects are MCP, Agents MD, Goose, Agent Gateway, and then also just this week, A2A, which is

• 22:33Speaker 02

  Google's Agent-to-Age protocol, has come into the foundation. And so these projects, now you have companies from all over contributing to these projects, right? Or these standards. You then give it like, you know, more of a voice. If you, if you wanted to use one of these projects, but it lives in one of these companies, you might be a bit hesitant, right? As a company to build your products on top of this, if it lives with this one company, I don't know what they're going to do. I don't know if they'll like kill it. I don't know if they'll just, the roadmap will only reflect their goals. You know what

• 23:16Speaker 02

  I mean? And so this being a part of the Agentic AI Foundation gives it that confidence that, hey, this is in a neutral place. I now can build on top of this. And so that's what it looks like. We do a lot of education around the projects, the protocols. We throw conferences in all parts of the globe. And I'll say like, one, one really cool aspect of this role. So in my last role, went deep on agents, but I'm also inside of my company, right? A little bit of open source, I'm consuming, but I'm still, my bubble is probably North America. Now, this is a global foundation where my job is to pay attention to what

• 24:01Speaker 02

  is happening across the world. How are they adopting Agentic AI in Japan, in China, in Africa? You know what I mean? And so now I have this, this global perspective, which is absolutely fascinating. And part of the role is also to help these various countries come together on these standards and protocols and projects so that they're interoperable across the board.

• 24:30Chris Benson?

  I'm curious. So that, that does sound super cool. I'm curious, with that global perspective that you're, that you have developed in this role, like, how, how do you, how do you assess? I think, I think it's very easy for, for pretty much, I think it's easy for anyone, kind of coming from their own perspective and their own little bubble that they're in, to kind of assume, I'm doing Agentic's and everybody else is doing it just like me or has the same needs and stuff like that. And, and so I think it's very easy to forget that diversity of location, diversity of life, all those things can change

• 25:10Chris Benson?

  the user's need for that. And so do you have any, any particular highlights from that global perspective on things, maybe that surprised you or that caught your interest? I'd love to hear some of that.

• 25:22Speaker 02

  So I would say in places like China that are mobile first, right? The way they use technology is a bit different than us. So we're in North America, I would say a very like SaaS heavy culture, whereas everything is like mobile over there. And so now, like they, for example, they have a big need for a protocol like Agent-to-Age, where you need like this app to be able to talk to that app. And they're both Agentic apps, right? And so they could like use that, like, for example, like WeChat uses that, you know,

• 26:04Speaker 02

  with various agents and stuff like that. So that was really fascinating to me to just see like, oh, even the types of applications you're using essentially influence like the, the types of tech that are standards or like anything like that that you might need. And so that's just one example. Yeah.

• 26:25Chris Benson?

  That's, that's cool. I'm curious. So, and this is where I'm going to be selfish on my part. I'm, as an engineer and a research scientist, I'm very focused on autonomy. And as you're getting into mobile and that's getting awfully close to, you know, thinking about edge concerns and stuff like that. And embodied intelligence, you know, is, is such a hot area. It's certainly the area that I'm focused on. And, and, you know, the, the rapid rise of robotics in all domains, you know, whether they're ground robots or flying things or whatever, is, is truly taking off like, like it never has before. No pun

• 27:05Chris Benson?

  intended there. I'm curious how with, with this kind of, and I think in some parts of the world, you see that more than others. I think in, in China, Japan, and there are certain places where you're going to see a lot more robotics than you will in the US. For US listeners or watchers, we don't have nearly as much of that here.

• 27:25Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 27:25Chris Benson?

  And so like, how does, how, when you're looking from, from trying to, to take these projects that the foundation has, and you're looking at those different needs and you're saying, well, You know, the Americans and the Canadians and such, you know, kind of have one way of doing it and the Chinese and the Japanese and other, you know, like that may have a different way. How do you reconcile, because that's quite different, you know, in terms of how you're using agents in those ways and the way you're configuring it and the way you're constructing them and what their utility is. How do you, how do you approach that when you're trying to make everybody happy with standards that are truly meant to be global?

• 28:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, that, that is why you need everyone at the table, right? And so if you only had like the, your, your top like famed companies in the U.S. kind of determining all of this and there's no one from these other countries that, hey, robotics is like a big deal here. Like, we have to think about the physical applications as well, right? Then you miss that perspective, right? And not to say like they don't have places there, but you need leadership from those companies to also have a part in crafting the story, right? And so that's exactly like what the working groups do, like find your lane, get into

• 28:48Speaker 02

  it, you know? Europe is another good example. So they just rolled out the EU AI Act, right? And so that like is going to change the transparency that these systems have had. And that's global. If you're going to be serving anything to someone in Europe, then you have to be able to adhere to these, these new legislations. And so that's another example where, okay, I don't care what country you come from. You have to, one, be aware of this and two, also help define how this should be done, right? There was a lot of backlash on how Anthropic wrote this out, for example, right?

• 29:30Speaker 02

  And so we have a working group that is looking at, are there some systems that we could build or some standards or something so that everyone doesn't have to reinvent this and figure out how they're going to do it, right? So then you have the voices from various countries together to figure this out and say, okay, what if we did it this way? They haven't solved that yet, by the way, but that's a, you know, active group that's meeting regularly. And by the way, all of these working groups are open, so anyone can join them. Just, you know, they have meetings, they're public, you could just like kind of go into it, see what they're talking about, even, you know, chime in with, with thoughts of your own.

• 30:13Speaker 02

  But these folks meet and, and this is, you have one for security, you have one for identity, like, you know, any lane that you care about, there's, there's someone there like kind of working on this from across the globe.

• 30:27Chris Benson?

  Yeah, I know, as a very specific to, to that, it was just a few days ago then Anthropic released their paper along with a blog post on watermarking.

• 30:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:38Chris Benson?

  So that you can detect, you know, AI-generated content and all that, which was a fact, like if, if we're, this is probably not the only episode that's going to come up one, I think we're, we're going to talk, we're going to probably do a deep dive on that very soon. And hint, hint. So, but that, that is one of those things that, you know, to your point, like affects everybody. And, and there probably needs to be somewhat universal approaches to what, what is watermarking? How should it be applied? What should it be applied to? How do you, you know, how do you utilize that, both as the provider and as the, the consumer of that?

• 31:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. Or do you even do watermarking?

• 31:17Chris Benson?

  Or do you do it?

• 31:18Speaker 02

  Is there a better way to do that, you know?

• 31:19Chris Benson?

  That's right, that's right. So, um, I'm, that, I think I'm starting to see lots and lots of different utilities. I, I imagine the foundation's going to grow quite a lot in the, in the years to come.

• 31:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:34Speaker 02

  There's definitely a lot of work to do.

• 31:38Daniel Whitenack?

  Super interesting and exciting to think about this agentic future driven by things like MCP and agent-to-agent interactions. But actually putting that architecture in place within your company, within your enterprise can be overwhelming because it sometimes seems like you just lose complete control. That's why I'm so privileged to be leading a company, Prediction Guard, that is helping you gain that control back. By deploying Prediction Guard, which is a self-hosted AI control plane within your organization, you can manage the supply chain on which your agents operate, institute runtime governance, manage observability, and none of that slows down agent building

• 32:21Daniel Whitenack?

  because it ships with a robust agent builder called Agent Forge out of the box. I would encourage you to check out what we're doing at predictionguard.com-practicalai. Book a time to get a demo and talk with our team, predictionguard.com-practicalai.

• 32:40Chris Benson?

  So as we, as we start getting to the point where we can, I'd love to dive into, kind of maybe get a high-level overview of the, of each of those projects that you described a little while ago, just kind of what it is for people that aren't familiar with them. And then, and then maybe dive into like where some of this stuff is going, you know, based on where you're at. I know that you and I have talked about MCP and other things, so I'd love to, I'd love to go wherever you want to go in terms of some technical deep dives, because we love that here.

• 33:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure. So we have Agents MD. So this was a standard created by OpenAI. And this one standardizes like how projects, meaning like code bases, communicate their, their operating instructions, right, to agents. And then there's Goose, which is one of the first open source AI agents. And this one essentially provides like this agentic runtime. And then there's MCP, of course, which connects agents to tools and systems. Agent Gateway, this one was, oh, and I didn't tell you, Goose came from Block and MCP came

• 33:56Speaker 02

  from Anthropic. Agent Gateway came from a company called Solo. And Solo created Agent Gateway to mediate traffic. So essentially like MCP traffic, A2A, as you're using this stuff in enterprise, you kind of want some controls around what the agent is doing and what it has access to. You want to, you know, make that observable and stuff like that. So Agent Gateway is an open source project that does that. And then A2A is the, the newest addition. This one is from Google. A2A is the agent-to-agent protocol.

• 34:36Speaker 02

  And this one is really cool in that this is how agents can coordinate with other agents. So you can delegate work to another agent or, you know, just be able to collaborate on a given task, right?

• 34:51Chris Benson?

  That's pretty cool. The, I'm curious, you know, one of the things that, that I know in, in my world that I've been exploring is, you know, if you look at late last year and people would just have an agent, you know, to do something. And then, you know, we kind of moved into this year and people are doing multiple agents that are starting to collaborate a bit and you're starting to have that kind of cross talk and collaboration. And then now we, you know, as we record this, we're in August and, and we're talking like it's gone up orders of magnitude in terms of, it's, it's some, and like that's not everybody. This is some use cases where you're talking tens of thousands of agents sometimes, or hundreds of thousands, or even millions are now coming into play.

• 35:35Chris Benson?

  And as you're, I'm curious, like, as you're looking, that, that has to be a challenge to some degree from a scalability standpoint, because, you know, going back to what you were saying before, we're, we are racing along so fast, much faster. And I'm, I'm old enough to remember, like, I, I won't, I'm, I'm old and therefore I remember before internet was even a thing. And, and I was even an adult at that point sadly. So, and so like, I know the velocity that things happened across each of the various technological revolutions that we've had over the past lifetime, if you will.

• 36:15Chris Benson?

  And so this is going so much faster than any of those others. And all of those have had processes, you know, that's why the Litix Foundation itself, you know, came into being and, and lots of others where these technologies came, there was the need to get collaboration across competitors and across global concerns and needs. But, but you've stepped into the fastest moving area ever and, and it's gone in just a space of months from like singles to millions. And as we, like, how does, how does a working group, and especially considering that these are, at the end of the day, all competitors, these different members, you know, in their,

• 36:59Chris Benson?

  in their own businesses, how do you manage that? Because by the time working groups, like historically, by the time a working group would arrive at something, like sometimes you were so far past that. So how, how does, is there anything, you know, like, are there any expected time scales or anything on how to get these things together so that it stays relevant? Because the speed, the speed of relevance is, is just unimaginable now. So in terms of how fast that is, like, how does this new foundation address these kinds of, of problems that we've, we've had to a lesser extent, but never like today? How do you do that?

• 37:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, we knew going in when we were standing the foundation up. In fact, that was a question. Do we, do we do a foundation? Foundations are slow, you know?

• 37:48Chris Benson?

  Yeah, I guess that's how people think.

• 37:50Speaker 02

  This is not slow. This is not a slow moving space. Do we do this, right? We, we realized we have to do this because you, you just have to have these neutral homes for things that are this critical. But we cannot move at the pace that your traditional foundation will move at. So we move a lot faster. And I think it really helps that the folks on a working group, these are not volunteers doing this in their spare time. Like it is part of their job, you know, to innovate the future. And if you know, hey, we, we are trying to build a product on this standard, then you're going to speed everybody else up.

• 38:34Speaker 02

  We have to come to some conclusions here, right? And I think that really helps is that the innovators themselves are the members of these working groups. And so they have, uh, basically, they, they, they have to move much faster. They have an incentive to not drag this along, you know?

• 38:54Chris Benson?

  Yeah, it does. I, I'm curious, you know, when you see, when they come into the working group, is it, you know, and you're talking, you know, what are to the rest of us on the outside, very fierce competitors, you know? You know, OpenAI and Claude and, you know, they're hammering it out and Google's in there and, you know, there's a whole slew of them. And, and is the, is the, is the tenor of the conversation a little bit, uh, is it, I guess, because A, they gotta get stuff done. As you said, gotta get stuff done because everyone's waiting to move on. Does that collaboration, do they kind of just draw? I'm just, it's just as a sheer crash, do they just drop kind of that external competitive behavior? And just get in and say, yeah, let's just get it done. And, and is that?

• 39:38Speaker 02

  Yes, they do. It's fascinating. They actually are very friendly with each other, right? And so like, sure, like, yeah, our companies just got into this heated Twitter war or something. But you and I gotta figure this standard out, you know what I mean?

• 39:53Chris Benson?

  You can let those crazy people talk, but we gotta get this thing done right now.

• 39:56Speaker 02

  Super, super collaborative, which is amazing. It's amazing to watch. I tell people, like, if you want to see the beauty of like open source and people working together from competing companies, all you gotta do is go into MCP Discord server. It's a thing of beauty. There's just like dozens of these working groups within that protocol itself. And you have members from everywhere, every company that's like doing real work, not just throwing ideas out, but like doing real work to add new features or figure out like how, how to do this other new thing or solve this problem. Because their companies depend on those things, right?

• 40:41Speaker 02

  And so it's beautiful. It's actually really beautiful to see.

• 40:44Chris Benson?

  So as we start winding up here, I'm curious, like, it, it's just, it's just kind of, you know, just the, the speed of operation is a little bit mind boggling. As you're looking ahead and you guys have put together this foundation and you're having those really, those really productive and rapid conversations to get stuff done so that, so that this world continues at the velocity it's at. Like where, what are, what are some of the things that you might expect to see? Having come along the path, because I think you're in a bit of a unique position to say, I, you know, you've, you've built into this, you're one of the people that set the foundation up. You've seen it start to work and you've seen it working well, you know?

• 41:27Chris Benson?

  And, and with that, with those kinds of relationships forming and everything, how do you see things moving forward? You know, what, um, and you could be a little speculative. It's fine to be wrong. I say things on the show all the time that are wrong.

• 41:44Chris Benson?

  Daniel and I are like, oh, oh, got that one wrong. But, but we try, but, but it's fun to, it's fun to try to think, you know, where, where might things go? What, what are your thoughts? Like, where do you think, where do you think we're heading into this brave new world where everyone's trying to figure out? Not just like what, like no one knows 10 years, but like, like people are trying to figure out, what is it going to be in six months?

• 42:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:07Chris Benson?

  What are your thoughts around that?

• 42:08Speaker 02

  If we look at like you and I, you know, and probably everyone listening to this podcast, we kind of live in this bubble where, you know, we're likely very exposed to AI. We're working with it daily. That is not the case across the, the world. Like, you know, the general population, uh, like you said, one, they hate AI. And two, they probably are not using it like in their day to day, right? Maybe they've asked ChatGPT a question. You know, they searched from something for Google and a little summary came up. And that's pretty much the extent of what they've done.

• 42:49Speaker 02

  So outside of our bubble, like we have so many challenges right now, just amongst like the tech community. Outside of that, when you start looking at how like the everyday person is going to utilize agents for all sorts of things, right? Within their lives, you just start seeing all of these other things that we need to figure out. And so I think that there's a lot we have to figure out. I think that'll consume us for the next couple of years. I do think that AI will become a part of, you know,

• 43:28Speaker 02

  the, the everyday person's day to day, just like mobile phones and internet have. I think the same will, will exist. I hope, I don't know, but I hope we're not just giving it all to the agents and we become workers for the agents, you know what I mean? I hope that we, we kind of get to that middle ground where we find, even though it's capable, this is not a good use of it. And these are the ways that we should be deploying it.

• 44:00Chris Benson?

  Fantastic. That's, I, I, I share that with you. Uh, I think, I think we need to find that, you know, where, where does the human fit into the equation? And where, where is AI a tremendous utility? Angie, thank you very much for coming on the show. This was a great conversation. Really appreciate it. Gave me a lot to think about. I plan to dive into, into some of those projects myself and learn a bit more about them. And thanks for coming on the show. Hope to have you back sometime.

• 44:28Speaker 02

  Thanks so much, Chris. I enjoyed it.

• 44:35Speaker 00

  All right, that's our show for this week. If you haven't checked out our website, head to practicalai.fm and be sure to connect with us on LinkedIn, X or Blue Sky. You'll see us posting insights related to the latest AI developments and we would love for you to join the conversation. Thanks to our partner Prediction Guard for providing operational support for the show. Check them out at predictionguard.com. Also, thanks to Breakmaster Cylinder for the beats and to you for listening. That's all for now, but you'll hear from us again next week.