Every team that gets serious about AI agents hits the same wall, usually around month three. The agent works. It reviews code the way you want, or it triages tickets, or it maintains your data pipelines. Then someone asks a simple question: can we run this somewhere else? Can we move it to the tool the platform team standardized on? Can we share it with the team in another office that uses a different product?
The answer, in most shops, is no. The agent is not a thing you own. It is a configuration scattered across one vendor's product: a system prompt in one screen, tool grants in another, accumulated context in a proprietary store, approval rules in a settings page nobody remembers configuring. The model behind the agent is swappable. The harness around it is not, and the harness is where everything you built actually lives.
This article is about the standards effort to fix that. I am going to walk through six specifications that, together, make the pieces of an agentic system portable: the Model Context Protocol (MCP), Agent Skills, Agent2Agent (A2A), the Open Agent Profile (OAP), the Agentic Graph Specification (AGS), and the Agent Approval Interchange Specification (AAIS). Full disclosure up front: I authored the last three of those, and I work at Dremio, which ships an MCP Server as part of its platform. I will keep the analysis honest anyway, including where each standard is young, unproven, or the wrong tool.
