Why I’m Joining the Agentic AI Foundation—Building the Foundation for the Internet of Agents

* Mazin Gilbert Mazin Gilbert is the Executive Director of the Agentic AI Foundation, part of the Linux Foundation. ---------------------------------------- We are at a clear inflection point in AI. For the past decade, we’ve watched AI evolve from research to real-world deployment. What’s happening now is different. Agentic AI is moving beyond isolated systems into something much larger: an interconnected ecosystem where autonomous agents collaborate, reason, and act across boundaries. This is the beginning of what we call the Internet of Agents. At moments like this, history is instructive. When technologies like cloud, mobile, and open networking transitioned from experimentation to infrastructure, progress depended on one thing: a neutral, open foundation where competitors could collaborate on shared standards. That’s exactly why the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) exists and why I’m honored to join the AAIF as its Executive Director. Over the course of my career, I’ve worked at the intersection of AI research and large-scale deployment, helping bring complex systems into real-world environments at AT&T and Google. When you’ve done that at scale, you learn where technologies break—and more importantly, what it takes for them to actually work in production. You learn that success isn’t about the model alone; it’s about how systems connect, interoperate, secure, and operate under real constraints. Today, Agentic AI is moving beyond experimentation into systems that can collaborate, reason, and act across tools, organizations, and industries. That shift creates enormous opportunity—but also a clear need for coordination and harmonization to avoid fragmentations. Right now, the ecosystem is advancing quickly, with developers, companies, and researchers building powerful agentic capabilities. At the same time, many of the foundational decisions—how agents communicate, how they access tools, how trust and safety are established—are being made independently. Without alignment and collaboration, that can introduce complexity for developers, increase costs of deployment, and slow the path to broader adoption. This is where the AAIF plays a critical role. AAIF exists to provide a neutral, open foundation where the full ecosystem – contributors, users, enterprises and community – can come together to build the shared infrastructure for agentic AI. It is the place where companies that compete in the market collaborate on the standards, protocols, and open source technologies that benefit everyone. Open source has always been driven by the people who build it—developers writing code, maintainers guiding projects, contributors improving and extending what exists. That community is what turns standards into working systems and ideas into widely adopted technology. AAIF is designed to support and grow that community, ensuring that the future of agentic AI is shaped in the open, with broad participation and shared ownership. At the same time, the engagement from our member organizations—across cloud providers, AI companies, enterprises, and beyond—brings the scale and real-world requirements needed to make these technologies production-ready. It’s the combination of community-driven development and industry collaboration that gives this work its strength. In the near term, our focus is on making agentic AI more interoperable and easier to deploy. That includes advancing open standards like the Model Context Protocol (MCP), supporting reference implementations like Goose that demonstrate how agents operate in real-world environments, and driving adoption of emerging standards like Agents.md to make systems more discoverable and agent-readable. Together, this work contributes to the broader frameworks needed to make agent behavior more secure, observable, and reliable in practice—so developers and enterprises can move from experimentation to production with confidence. Looking ahead, I see AAIF being the center of gravity for Agentic AI, growing across three dimensions: expanding the technical projects that form the foundation of the ecosystem, deepening engagement in key industries where agentic AI can have the most impact, and broadening global participation to reflect the full diversity of this community. These efforts are interconnected. As the technology evolves, the role of the foundation is to help ensure that developers have the tools they need, organizations have the confidence to adopt, and the ecosystem continues to move forward together. This is a moment where open collaboration matters. The decisions we make now—about standards, governance, and how we build—will shape how agentic AI develops for years to come. Being part of a foundation that brings together such a strong and diverse community to work on these challenges is both a responsibility and an opportunity. We are still early in defining what this ecosystem will become. But with the right foundation in place—one that is open, neutral, and community-driven—we have a rare opportunity to build something that is not only powerful, but broadly accessible, secure and sustainable. I’m excited to be part of that work, and to build it together with this community.