Angie Jones — VP of the Agentic AI Foundation — joins Chris Benson on Practical AI to explain what a neutral home for agent standards actually does. The foundation formed at the end of 2025 under the Linux Foundation, started by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Block, because no one wants a standard “cooked in one kitchen.”

The portfolio of projects

  • MCP (Anthropic) — Model Context Protocol: how agents connect to apps and tools
  • AgentsMD (OpenAI) — standardizes how codebases communicate their operating instructions to agents (the AGENTS.md pattern, formalized)
  • Goose (Block) — one of the first open-source AI agents; an agentic runtime
  • Agent Gateway (Solo) — mediates and controls agent/MCP/A2A traffic in the enterprise: observability, access control
  • A2A (Google) — agent-to-agent protocol; the newest addition, landed “this week” — how agents delegate work to and coordinate with other agents

Why a neutral home matters

  • Companies hesitate to build on a standard that lives inside a competitor — “I don’t know if they’ll kill it; the roadmap will only reflect their goals”
  • Working groups (all open, public meetings): agentic commerce (Visa, PayPal, Stripe at the table), security, identity, EU AI Act transparency, watermarking
  • Global input is structural, not decorative: China’s mobile-first world drives A2A demand (WeChat-style agent interop), robotics is a first-class concern in China/Japan, and Europe’s AI Act affects everyone who serves EU users
  • The framing: the groups “define the rules of the game and create the game board together — once that’s figured out, now we can compete”

How Block actually rolled out agents (the 1/9/90 model)

Angie’s job at Block was teaching all 12,000 employees — finance, marketing, design, HR — to use agents, on Jack Dorsey’s mandate, starting in early 2024 when the tools were CLIs and the models weren’t that good yet:

  • Change management is the job: experts don’t want their processes thrown away; fear and resistance are real. The winning move is the middle ground — realistic about strengths and weaknesses, not Kool-Aid
  • Give them a win, not a lecture: a finance person who used to file a report request and wait gets the same data in seconds via an MCP server — that sells itself, then trust builds step by step
  • The 1/9/90 rule: 1% creators, 9% tinkerers, 90% consumers. Rather than lift 3,500 developers at once, she recruited ~50 champions — one from every major repo (frontend, backend, iOS, Android), 30% of their time — who learned together, then baked the knowledge into the systems (AGENTS.md files, context engineering, agent skills in the repo) and brown-bagged it to their teams
  • Devs who tried early tools and got burned threw their hands up; the models only got genuinely good around November 2025 — so the champions model carried the org until the tools earned the skeptics back

On speed and the future

  • Foundations are traditionally slow; this one can’t be. The working groups are staffed by paid innovators whose companies depend on the standards — they have an incentive to move, and it shows
  • Rivalry melts at the table: “our companies just got into a heated Twitter war, but you and I got this standard up. You can let those crazy people talk.”
  • Her hope for the everyday future: AI becomes as ordinary as mobile phones — but we land in the middle ground, where we delegate what AI is good at and keep the human part, rather than becoming “workers for the agents”

“They are defining the rules of the game and creating the game board together. Once they have that figured out — all right, now we can compete. Deal me in.”