Agentic AI, LLMs and standards big focus of Red Hat Summit

To make that happen, Red Hat is betting on a couple of new technologies, both released in the latter half of last year by commercial vendors — but are both open source and have the potential of becoming industry standards.

One was obvious — MCP, or model context protocol, allows AI systems and agents to communicate with resources, tools, and data sources.

Since it was open-sourced by Anthropic late last year it has been adopted by a number of big tech vendors, including Google and Microsoft, as well as by its biggest rival, ChatGPT maker OpenAI.

The other one wasn’t as obvious. Llama Stack, released by Meta in September of 2024, is a set of tools for building, scaling and deploying AI applications and agentic systems.

A more popular alternative, the open source project LangChain, dates back to 2022. As of last October, LangChain reported more than 130 million downloads and 132,000 apps built using the technology, but it doesn’t exactly have the weight of a giant like Meta behind it.  It’s too early to call MCP and Llama Stacks the new standards for agentic AI.  But, says Forrester’s Dickerson, “Red Hat’s support along with others does lend credibility and momentum.”

In addition to helping enterprises deploy their own AI, Red Hat is also integrating AI into its own products.  Big announcements in this area included AI assistants and AI-driven automation for setting up IT environments inside the Linux operating systems, said Walid Negm, US software-defined vehicle CTO at Deloitte Consulting.