About
An independent standards organization for the agent era.
SAIL Institute
Mission and origin.
SAIL Institute — formally the Southeast Artificial Intelligence Leadership Institute — is an independent standards organization founded in 2026 to advance open specifications for the responsible deployment of AI agents.
We exist because the agent era arrived faster than the accountability infrastructure required to support it. Vendors ship agents. Buyers deploy them. Operators run them. Every link in that chain currently depends on private assurances rather than shared standards.
Our work is to change that — by publishing open specifications, fostering implementation across the ecosystem, and giving builders, buyers, and operators a common vocabulary for agent deployment.
Our mission is to establish and steward open standards that make AI agent deployment verifiable, portable, and auditable — for the benefit of anyone who builds, deploys, or relies on agents.
Why Southeast?
Global scope. Southern roots.
SAIL Institute is headquartered in Waxhaw, North Carolina, in a region with deep operational industries — logistics, manufacturing, trades, agriculture, defense — that will be among the first to feel the real-world consequences of AI agent deployment.
Our standards work is informed by the practical realities of these industries, not by Silicon Valley assumptions about how agents will be used. The Southeast is where agents will meet the businesses that keep the country running.
Founder
KEITH SHERMAN · FOUNDER
Keith Sherman
Keith Sherman is the founder of SAIL Institute and the principal author of the Agent Deployment Standard.
A retired U.S. Navy Senior Chief with twenty-six years of service, including combat deployments, Keith brings an operator’s perspective to AI standards work — informed by years in environments where the gap between the system says it did the task and the task actually got done had real consequences.
Following his military career, Keith founded Gold Star Dirt, a 501(c)(3) that documented the stories of more than fifty Gold Star families across all fifty states, contributing over 160 hours of oral history to the Library of Congress under the Gold Star Voices Act. The project covered more than 50,000 miles over 428 days. Seeing struggling family businesses on that journey planted the seeds of the operational AI work he does today.
Keith’s commercial work in AI is conducted through Arkanis, a vertical AI operations platform for trades businesses, where he serves as founder and applies SAIL’s standards work to production deployments.
He lives in Waxhaw, North Carolina.
Governance
Open by default.
SAIL Institute operates as an independent standards body. The Agent Deployment Standard and all SAIL publications are released under open licenses. Specifications are developed in public on GitHub. We welcome contributions, critique, and implementation reports from any party — commercial, academic, or governmental.
Contact the Institute