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Agentic AI? Not just a flash in the pan
Agentic AI basically didn’t exist as a mainstream topic until this year.
Even within the fast-moving world of AI, the concept of ‘agentic’ has entered the business lexicon with remarkable speed.
If you’re new to the term, it’s a deceptively simple definition. Agentic AI is AI that can autonomously pursue goals — observing its environment, making decisions, taking actions, and adapting based on feedback — rather than simply generating outputs when prompted. It’s AI that has ‘agency’.
In our consumer lives, AI agents could directly book travel for us, make purchases, or send emails, instead of just telling us humans where to click!
Agentic AI matters because it marks the moment AI stops being just a reasoning engine and becomes an active participant in digital work. By combining goal-seeking behaviour, planning, and tool use — thanks to innovations like MCP — agentic systems can take on higher-value, multi-step tasks that previously required human coordination — unlocking new automation opportunities while introducing new challenges in safety and governance.
You can see why it’s catching on.
Here in Spectro Cloud’s AI team, we’re extremely bullish on agentic, because we believe it is the key to unlocking true automation for burdensome manual tasks, freeing developers and platform engineers from some of the most boring and repetitive parts of their days — with a knock-on effect on innovation, speed, and end user experience.
Of course, while agents can be a huge productivity booster, they must be used wisely, with a human in the loop and with robust security and privacy controls for safety. As we’re building the next generation of products and open source software for AI, we all need to take responsibility for the outcomes we deliver, and whether they meet expectations.
That’s where the AAIF comes in.
Meet the Agentic AI Foundation
This week the Linux Foundation announced a new project: the Agentic AI Foundation, or AAIF.
You can read the announcements for all the key facts, but in a nutshell, the AAIF exists to “provide a neutral, open foundation to ensure agentic AI evolves transparently and collaboratively”. That’s a mission we can get behind.
The AAIF initially is rallying around three projects, some just a few months old:
- MCP, or model context protocol, originally created just a year ago by Anthropic as a standard protocol for AI models to interact with each other and the world.
- goose, “an open source, local-first AI agent framework that combines language models, extensible tools, and standardized MCP-based integration”.
- AGENTS.md, “a simple, universal standard that gives AI coding agents a consistent source of project-specific guidance needed to operate reliably across different repositories and toolchains”.
We’re in good company
If you check out the announcement and project website, you’ll see some of the biggest names in the world of IT and AI, including AWS, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Cloudflare.
Scroll down a bit (!) and you’ll also see our name. That’s right: Spectro Cloud is proud to be a paid-up founding silver member of the AAIF. It felt right for us: we’re a Linux Foundation and CNCF sponsor already.
Why did we join? Because nothing is more important than governance
Organizations like the AAIF play a hugely important role in open source governance. Particularly in spaces like agentic, where risk is high and interoperability so important, it’s vital to have a neutral meeting place where smart people can collaborate and advance the state of the art in a transparent and accountable way.
Through our active participation in the AAIF, we hope to help drive agreement for standards in how organizations consume, develop and promote safe agentic AI.
But more than that, we want to share our lessons learned in our own use of agentic AI with the wider open source community, and contribute to the next generation of open source software dedicated to AI, focused on security, privacy and scalability.
What are we doing with agentic AI already at Spectro Cloud?
Agentic may be new, but here at Spectro Cloud we already apply it to improve the employees’ experience and increase productivity across many departments, from HR to engineering.
Of course, our projects are at different stages, from MVP to production, and we’re treading carefully to ensure the correct guardrails are implemented and our colleagues’ and customers’ privacy is protected.
Join the community
Through our open source and AI teams, we’re active across dozens of projects and associations. We’re proud of the role that open source plays in our business, and we truly value the contribution that the OSS community brings to the worlds of IT and AI. Now, with the AAIF, we’re more optimistic than ever about the positive impact of AI on the world.
If you’d like to join us, you can learn more about the AAIF right here.