What is A2A (Agent to Agent Protocol)?
I recently wrote about MCP, a standardised protocol for LLMs to communicate with AI tools and resources. A couple of days ago Google introduced another exciting standard: A2A (Agent to Agent).
Google’s A2A protocol allows AI agents to communicate with each other, securely exchange information, and coordinate actions on top of various enterprise platforms and applications.
Google’s A2A demo video highlights four main capabilities that form the backbone of this new protocol:
Capability Discovery — Agents can ‘advertise their capabilities’ so that a client knows which agent to use for a specific task. Each agent needs an agent card to enable this discovery. An agent card is a public metadata file with a standardised structure that describes the agent’s capabilities, skills, endpoint URL, and authentication requirements.
Task Management — The protocol ensures that communication between agents focuses solely on completing specific tasks.
Collaboration — Agents can seek clarification, request information or specific actions from clients or users when needed to complete their tasks.
User Experience Negotiation — Each message includes “parts” (fully formed pieces of content). Each part has a specified content type, allowing client and remote agents to negotiate the correct content format and explicitly include negotiations of the user’s UI capabilities — e.g., iframes, video, web forms, and more.
The new A2A protocol has been developed with support from 50+ technology partners including Atlassian, Salesforce, Workday, Box and MongoDB. The promise is that this framework will enable AI agents from different vendors and frameworks to work seamlessly across businesses’ entire enterprise application ecosystems.
Main learning point: After seeing Anthropic introduce MCP, Google now brings another, complimentary standard to enable interoperability between enterprise systems and AI tools.
Related links for further learning:
- https://developers.googleblog.com/en/a2a-a-new-era-of-agent-interoperability/
- https://hackernoon.com/google-a2a-a-first-look-at-another-agent-agent-protocol
- https://github.com/google/A2A
- https://google.github.io/A2A/#/documentation
- https://medium.com/the-low-end-disruptor/google-a2a-a-first-look-at-another-agent-agent-protocol-cb853aa4d084
- https://venturebeat.com/ai/googles-agent2agent-interoperability-protocol-aims-to-standardize-agentic-communication/
- https://medium.com/@sahin.samia/googles-agent2agent-a2a-protocol-a-new-era-of-agent-interoperability-fde7f37760bc
- https://medium.com/google-cloud/how-to-deploy-adk-agents-onto-google-cloud-run-5bbd62049a19
