Every startup building enterprise container management in 2015 was gone by 2018. The AAIF just started the same clock for agent orchestration.
On April 2nd, the Agentic AI Foundation announced a global 2026 events circuit: MCP Dev Summits across New York, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Seoul, Shanghai, Tokyo, Toronto, and Nairobi, anchored by AGNTCon + MCPCon flagship conferences in Amsterdam and San Jose. When the Linux Foundation organizes a global circuit around a technology, it means large buyers are done evaluating and want standards. They want vendor-neutral plumbing they can procure, audit, and replace independently.
The CNCF standardized the container ecosystem in 2016–2018. Every startup selling differentiated container orchestration was wiped out within two years. Kubernetes became infrastructure; value moved to observability (Datadog), security (Aqua), and developer experience (Helm).
MCP and A2A will become the Kubernetes of agents: the assumed foundation, not the product.
Where value migrates
The highest-value bet right now is security and governance. Post-MCP/A2A, the attack surface expands. Standardized protocols make it easier for agents to reach more systems, and that creates real audit and runtime exposure for enterprise buyers. The frameworks that implement tool sandboxing, usage provenance, and runtime verification will own the margin. That's exactly what happened post-Kubernetes: Aqua, Falco, and Open Policy Agent extracted serious value while orchestration commoditized beneath them.
Below security, the durable plays are verticalization. The agent that does something hard (legal document analysis, drug interaction detection, real-time options pricing) is the product. Vertical depth beats horizontal plumbing every time, once the plumbing is standardized. Nobody pays premium for generic; they pay for the thing that knows their domain.
The connector layer sits at the same level. The integrations between agent capabilities and enterprise systems (ERP, CRM, data warehouses) won't be standardized by AAIF. Too messy, too industry-specific. The shops that own those integrations will collect rent at every MCP-compliant deployment edge, quietly.
The limit of the analogy
Container orchestration had cleaner abstraction boundaries than agent coordination. Containers are isolated; agents share context, call each other, and fail in messier ways. The CNCF playbook doesn't map perfectly.
But the market dynamic maps exactly: a vendor-neutral body commoditizes the infrastructure layer, and value compresses to whatever is above and below it. That part doesn't change.
If you're building on MCP/A2A, this is validation. The plumbing is getting standardized whether you participate or not. The only useful question is what you're building on top of it that can't be standardized away.