Analyst(s): Mitch Ashley
Publication Date: June 18, 2025
Anthropic, Google, AWS, Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, Meta, OWASP, NIST, open-source, and academic communities rally to develop open standards for agentic AI, addressing the emerging needs for communication, orchestration, and interoperability among AI agents. Futurum Research VP and Practice Lead Mitch Ashley tackles tracking and analyzing rapid developments in open standards to assemble the Futurum Top 10 Essential Agentic AI Open Standards for the first half of 2025.
Key Points:
- A new Futurum Research report, “Futurum Agentic AI Open Standards Report: 1H-2025 Edition,” highlights the top 10 critical open standards for successful AI agents. Essential standards include MCP, A2A, and ANS.
- A significant trend identified in this research is the accelerated development and adoption of critical AI standards directly by industry innovators. This rapid progression by leading companies is occurring at a pace that surpasses traditional standards organizations.
- Further development and adoption of open standards are crucial for promoting interoperability and preventing vendor lock-in. Thus, openness and collaboration are strategic imperatives.
Overview:
Agentic AI is rapidly transforming software development. Advanced agentic AI technologies not only generate code but also assist in various steps throughout the development process and across different stages of the software development lifecycle.
Practitioners expect tangible results from the use of agentic AI in their DevOps, platforms, and testing toolsets, as evidenced by Futurum Research’s Software Engineering Lifecycle Decision-Maker 2025 data. These requirements for agentic AI are essential drivers of innovation cycles for emerging open standards.
Figure 1: Challenges AI-augmented Development or DevOps Tools Currently Address
Vendors have recognized they cannot climb the agentic AI mountain alone. Today, technology companies, non-profits, and academia are leading the open standards innovation cycles of agentic AI. These standards so far have applied to how agentic AI performs complicated, multi-step workflows across setup, analysis, code generation, testing, debugging, code refactoring, continuous integration, and deployment.
“Industry leaders and innovators know open standards are a necessity for agentic AI adoption to keep pace with AI innovation cycles. Tech vendors can’t go it alone, creating an environment of greater cooperation, transparency, and rapid adoption of open standards,” said Mitch Ashley, VP Practice Lead of Software Engineering Lifecycle at Futurum.
During 1H 2025, Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent2Agent (A2A) protocols are the most visible open standards. While those may be the most visible, other necessary open standards are being developed in parallel to address critical issues for AI agents. The Agent Communication Protocol (ACP), Agent Naming Service (ANS), and OpenTelemetry GenAI Semantic Conventions are among the open standards being tracked by Futurum analysts.
Figure 2: Top 10 Essential Agentic AI Open Standards
“The Futurum Agentic AI Open Standards Report sifts through innovations across the industry to identify, analyze, and track the most important emerging open standards. Vendors and practitioners adopting agentic AI must understand and align with the timing of key protocols for their product and IT software roadmaps,” advised Ashley.
Conclusion
This first report sets the baseline for looking forward as open standards emerge and develop. Given the relative maturity of agentic AI, these open standards will continue to grow and mature, while new open standards will emerge.
The full report is available via subscription to Futurum Intelligence’s Software Engineering Lifecycle IQ service—click here for inquiry and access.
About the Futurum Software Engineering Lifecycle Practice
The Futurum Software Engineering Lifecycle practice offers actionable, objective insights for market leaders and their teams, enabling them to respond to emerging opportunities and drive innovation. Public access to our coverage can be seen here. Follow news and updates from the Futurum Practice on LinkedIn and X. Visit the Futurum Newsroom for more information and insights.
Author Information
Mitch Ashley is VP and Practice Lead of DevOps and Application Development for The Futurum Group. Mitch has over 30+ years of experience as an entrepreneur, industry analyst, product development, and IT leader, with expertise in software engineering, cybersecurity, DevOps, DevSecOps, cloud, and AI. As an entrepreneur, CTO, CIO, and head of engineering, Mitch led the creation of award-winning cybersecurity products utilized in the private and public sectors, including the U.S. Department of Defense and all military branches. Mitch also led managed PKI services for broadband, Wi-Fi, IoT, energy management and 5G industries, product certification test labs, an online SaaS (93m transactions annually), and the development of video-on-demand and Internet cable services, and a national broadband network.
Mitch shares his experiences as an analyst, keynote and conference speaker, panelist, host, moderator, and expert interviewer discussing CIO/CTO leadership, product and software development, DevOps, DevSecOps, containerization, container orchestration, AI/ML/GenAI, platform engineering, SRE, and cybersecurity. He publishes his research on FuturumGroup.com and TechstrongResearch.com/resources. He hosts multiple award-winning video and podcast series, including DevOps Unbound, CISO Talk, and Techstrong Gang.
