Major vendors are racing to launch AI agents, while MCP and A2A now sit under one neutral foundation. What changed, the limits, and six steps to keep ownership of your integration layer.
Tim MarkasDevTechnology Partner, Jakarta
In the past two weeks, the largest vendors have raced to put AI agents into the workplace. On 25 September 2026, Microsoft brought Chat, Cowork, Code, and Autopilot together in one Copilot, with a unified plugin registry and cost controls for agentic workloads, according to InfoWorld. Four days later, OpenAI introduced dots, always-on agents that can connect to more than 4,000 apps through its plugin ecosystem, including a preview of specialist dots with their own identity and credentials inside an organisation.
For leaders and operations managers, the important question is not which agent is smartest. It is this: once agents start connecting to your core systems, which standard do those connections use, and can you still switch vendors without rebuilding everything?
AI agents can be replaced in a matter of weeks. Integrations into core systems usually last for years. The integration layer is what you need to protect.
Two open protocols come up most often in conversations about AI agents.
On 17 August 2026, the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), hosted by the Linux Foundation, announced that A2A was joining as a hosted project, alongside MCP, AGENTS.md, goose, and agentgateway. The official A2A blog says A2A was accepted as a Growth Stage project.
Some facts from those two sources:
| Layer | Standard | Question it answers |
|---|---|---|
| Agent to tools and data | MCP | How does an agent read and use your systems? |
| Agent to agent | A2A | How does vendor A's agent hand a task to vendor B's agent? |
| Traffic and control | agentgateway | Where do routing, policy, and observability sit? |
| Project instructions | AGENTS.md | How are working rules passed to agents? |
On 28 July 2026, the MCP maintainers released specification version 2026-07-28. They reported close to half a billion monthly downloads across the Tier 1 SDKs. The changes most relevant to organisations:
iss parameter (RFC 9207), credentials are bound to the authorisation server that issued them, and Dynamic Client Registration is deprecated in favour of Client ID Metadata Documents.stderr or using OpenTelemetry instead.The MCP maintainers are open about the cost: there is migration work, especially for developers who relied on session identifiers.
On 14 September 2026, the Linux Foundation launched the MCPA certification. The second-largest share of the exam, 24 percent, is security and governance. That signals that trust boundaries, permissions, and risk controls are treated as core competence, not an add-on.
The fact is that agent standards are now run by a neutral foundation, and the specifications are mature enough for production use. Our interpretation: this lowers one specific risk, a protocol that follows a single vendor's product decisions.
But an open standard does not automatically make you free to move. Business rules, context data, permissions, and an agent's work history still live in the platform you choose. The latest MCP release also shows that even a standard can change fundamentally. The difference is that such changes now come with a clear window, so they can be planned.
Many organisations in Indonesia, from local governments and hospitals to rural banks and logistics companies, will meet AI agents through products they already use, not through a dedicated AI project. That means architecture decisions are often made without anyone noticing. Six practical steps help you keep control.
iss validation is enabled.If your organisation is starting to use AI agents and wants to avoid being locked into one vendor, request a Diagnose through our contact page. We start from the connections you already have, not from a vendor choice.
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