If your company has built (or is considering) an AI automation — an assistant that answers emails, a workflow that sorts invoices, an agent that queries your database — there is an awkward question almost nobody asks before signing: what happens to all that work if you switch providers tomorrow? Until this week, the honest answer was “you throw it away and start over”. On August 6, that answer started to change.
OpenAI announced Agent Plugins, an open standard for packaging AI agent extensions. What matters is not the announcement itself but who signed it: the technical committee includes Amazon, Microsoft, Cursor, Vercel and OpenAI itself, and Google joined as a maintainer days later. When rivals agree on a common format, it pays to pay attention.
What exactly was announced
Agent Plugins is an open, vendor-neutral specification (version 1.0.0, published at agent-plugins.org) that defines how to package the two ingredients of any AI agent:
- The working instructions (so-called Agent Skills): the “manual” that tells the agent how to do a specific task in your business — how to draft your quotes, how to triage your tickets, what tone to reply with.
- The connections to your data and tools (MCP servers): the “plug” that gives it access to your ERP, your email, your database or your calendar.
Until now, each vendor kept these pieces in its own format: what you built for ChatGPT was useless in Copilot, and vice versa. The standard defines a single package that any compatible client can read. Google already supports it in two of its developer products, and the other signatories maintain the standard in public, on GitHub, under an open license.
A plugin is a folder (and that is the point)
The technical part fits in one sentence: a plugin is a folder with a fixed format — a manifest that identifies it, a subfolder with the instructions and a file declaring the connections. Nothing else.
That simplicity is deliberate, and it is the real news for whoever pays the bill: the business knowledge you teach an agent stops living “inside” a vendor’s platform and becomes a portable asset you own, the same way your documents or your website are yours today.
| Before | With the standard | |
|---|---|---|
| Agent instructions | Trapped in each platform | One package that moves with you |
| Connection to your systems | Rebuilt on every change | Declared once, common format |
| Switching providers | Start from scratch | Take your folder with you |
Why this matters even if you are not technical
Because the biggest risk of investing in AI today is not that the technology fails: it is dependency. Prices that go up, products that get discontinued, terms that change. Many SMBs delay adoption precisely because they fear betting on the wrong horse.
A standard backed by the major vendors reduces that risk directly. It does not eliminate it — standards take time to spread, and this one is a week old — but it changes the conversation with any provider: there is now a neutral format you can demand as a deliverable. It is the difference between renting your automation and owning it.
What the standard does not solve
Let’s be honest — that is what we are here for. The specification deliberately leaves out several things that remain each platform’s responsibility (and yours):
- Security and permissions. The standard says how a plugin is packaged, not whether it can be trusted. Installing a plugin from a dubious source will still be a bad idea, just like installing any software from a dubious source.
- Installation and distribution. Each client decides how plugins are installed and from where.
- Real-world compatibility. The format existing does not mean every product reads it yet. The announced adoption is a starting point, not a done deal.
And an obvious point that often gets forgotten: a portable format does not make the agent work well. The quality of the instructions and the connections is still the job of whoever designs them.
What to do about it in your SMB
Nothing drastic, but three concrete moves:
- If you already run AI automations, ask your provider whether the instructions and connections are (or will be) in standard formats: Agent Skills, MCP and, now, Agent Plugins. The answer tells you how much leaving would cost you.
- If you are about to commission AI work, require deliverables in open formats. It is a cheap clause today that is worth money tomorrow.
- If you were waiting for this to mature, this move is one of the signals you were waiting for: the industry is converging on standard building blocks, and what you build on them will age better.
At SamApps we build AI automations and integrations on these open formats for exactly this reason: what you pay for should be yours, even if one day you work with someone else. If you want to know what can be automated in your company — and what is not worth it — tell us about your case and we will give you a straight answer.