Builders
Reference patterns, schema definitions, and conformance guidance for shipping ADS-compatible agents into production workflows.
Southeast Artificial Intelligence Leadership Institute
Setting the standard for AI agent deployment.
SAIL Institute is an independent standards organization advancing open specifications for responsibly deploying AI agents into operational business workflows. We publish the Agent Deployment Standard — an open specification for how AI agents declare scope, escalate to humans, and produce verifiable audit trails.
Why this exists
The agent era needs accountability, not just capability.
The conversation about AI agents has fixated on what they can do. The harder question — and the one that determines whether agents become real infrastructure or a passing wave — is whether anyone can verify what they have done, and whether they were deployed responsibly in the first place.
An agent that completes a task is only useful if its completion can be checked. An agent that fails is only safe if its failure is visible. Without shared standards for deployment, every agent placement becomes a private trust exercise between vendor and buyer.
SAIL Institute exists to change that.
Published · Version 0.1 · Working Draft
The Agent Deployment Standard
ADS is an open specification that defines how AI agents declare their authorized scope, hand off context across systems, escalate to humans, record their work, recognize known counterparties, and produce a verifiable audit trail. It is designed for builders who need to ship accountable agents, buyers who need to evaluate them, and operators who need to run them.
ADS v0.1 is a working draft, openly developed on GitHub, licensed under Apache 2.0.
Who we serve
Built for the people doing the work.
Buyers
Procurement language and evaluation checklists for assessing agent vendors against a shared deployment standard rather than vendor self-attestation.
Operators
Deployment patterns, escalation taxonomies, and verification workflows for running agents in production environments where accountability matters.
Open standards. Public benefit. Southeast roots.
SAIL Institute is headquartered in North Carolina and was founded in 2026 by Keith Sherman, principal author of the Agent Deployment Standard. We publish openly, govern transparently, and build for the long term.
Our work is global in scope. Our roots are Southern.
About the Institute