A2AProtocol
A2A (Agent-to-Agent) is an open protocol published by Google that defines a standard interface for AI agents to discover each other's capabilities, delegate tasks, and exchange results. It is designed to be model-agnostic and framework-agnostic. Agents advertise their capabilities in a standard format, accept tasks in a standard envelope, and return results in a predictable structure, enabling agents built on different AI systems to collaborate without custom integration code.
MCP standardises how an AI agent communicates with tools — databases, APIs, services. A2A solves a complementary problem: how one AI agent communicates with another. Without a standard, agent-to-agent delegation requires custom handshake code for every pairing of frameworks and models, limiting composability in multi-agent architectures.
Placed in Assess at inner position because A2A and MCP together define the emerging infrastructure layer for multi-agent systems. MCP handles the agent-to-tool boundary; A2A handles the agent-to-agent boundary. Teams building production multi-agent systems should be tracking both protocols now, before one or both become assumed. The inner position reflects that adoption is early but the direction is clear — agent interoperability will require a standard, and A2A is the most credible candidate currently.
The key question for the next 12 months is whether A2A adoption spreads beyond Google-ecosystem tooling to frameworks like LangGraph, AutoGen, and Agno.
