OpenTelemetry Defines GenAI Session Conventions

This is the unglamorous infrastructure AI developers desperately need: observability is only useful when every provider speaks the same language. The convention is promising, but adoption—not specification—is the real bottleneck.

• –`gen_ai.conversation.id` can connect multi-turn sessions that span retries, background agents, and multiple traces.
• –The project covers model calls, agent workflows, tool execution, MCP, metrics, and structured input/output telemetry.
• –Adoption remains uneven; OpenTelemetry’s own issue documents major instrumentations that still fail to emit conversation IDs. [Issue #145](https://github.com/open-telemetry/semantic-conventions-genai/issues/145)
• –Developers should not substitute `trace_id` for session identity because one session can span multiple traces, while one trace can contain multiple sessions.
• –The conventions remain in Development, so teams should isolate their attribute mappings and expect schema churn. [Project README](https://github.com/open-telemetry/semantic-conventions-genai)