Standards are forming
The window where early movers shape how an industry's agents talk to each other is open now, and it will not stay open.
Why now
The SaaS assumption is breaking.
Every piece of enterprise software built in the last thirty years rests on one unstated assumption: a human sits at a keyboard, logs into an interface, clicks buttons and reads outputs. That assumption is now breaking down faster than most boards appreciate.
The agentic shiftOpen protocolsBuild now, not retrofit
The shift
An agent doesn't log into your dashboard.
The world being replaced
A person opens a dashboard, exports a spreadsheet, emails it to a colleague, and someone reads a chart. Data moves at the speed of human attention, and its value is capped by the hours in a working day.
The world arriving
An AI agent acting for a CFO queries another agent directly, negotiates what data it needs, receives a structured response, synthesises it with answers from three other agents, and surfaces a recommendation. The human gets the answer without ever touching the underlying systems.
In that world, the companies whose data is clean, governed and machine-readable become the suppliers every agent calls first. Everyone else is invisible to the market that matters.
The protocol layer
The open protocols are being standardised right now.
Open standards like Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Google's Agent-to-Agent protocol (A2A) are defining how AI models communicate with external tools and data sources. They are the TCP/IP equivalents of the agentic internet, and every major AI lab is building toward them.
Retrofitting is expensive
Companies that build their data infrastructure for the agentic era now will not need to retrofit later. Those that wait will pay for the same work twice, under pressure.
Readiness is the moat
The advantage does not go to the company with the most data. It goes to the company whose data an agent can actually use.
How we build for it
Four commitments that make a platform agent-native.
Agent-native from day one
Our platform components speak the open agent protocols as a first-class citizen, not through an adapter bolted on later. Any agent speaking the standard can discover and work with a member.
A shared vocabulary per industry
Agent-to-agent commerce only works when both sides mean the same thing by the same word. We build the industry semantic layer first, so agents negotiate meaning instead of guessing at it.
Verifiable identity at the boundary
Every agent in the network carries a verifiable identity, and every transaction across a member's data boundary is logged. Trust in an agentic market is enforced by the architecture, not by policy documents.
Machine-speed settlement
When data transactions happen at machine speed, revenue sharing cannot be a quarterly finance exercise. The commercial rails are designed to settle as fast as the agents transact.