Backed by over 50 tech leaders, the Agent-to-Agent Protocol (A2A) lays the foundation for scalable, secure, and vendor-neutral communication between AI agents.
How do you ensure that millions of AI agents can talk to each other — securely, across platforms, and at scale? That’s the challenge Google set out to solve with the launch of A2A, the Agent-to-Agent Protocol, a new open-source standard designed to make true multi-agent AI systems a reality.
Unveiled this week, A2A is being heralded as a potential missing layer in the modern agentic architecture — a neutral communication framework for AI agents to coordinate tasks and collaborate seamlessly, even across organizational and technical boundaries. This move signals a major step forward in enabling agent-based automation, especially in enterprise and multi-cloud environments.
And the industry is listening. Over 50 technology and consulting partners are backing A2A from day one — including Salesforce, SAP, Atlassian, LangChain, MongoDB, JetBrains, Box, ServiceNow, Accenture, Deloitte, Wipro, TCS, and BCG, among others.
🔍 What Is A2A?
A2A is an open protocol that allows autonomous AI agents to:
- Discover each other’s capabilities
- Communicate and coordinate task execution
- Exchange structured responses (called “artifacts”)
- Negotiate formats and user interface expectations
- Work across organizations, frameworks, and tech stacks
This is made possible through a set of common standards — including HTTP, SSE (Server-Sent Events), and JSON-RPC — which makes A2A easy to integrate into existing IT infrastructure.
In contrast to the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which helps agents connect to APIs and enterprise systems, A2A is designed to connect agents directly to each other — creating a foundation for large-scale, interoperable agent networks.
🔁 Think of it like this:
- MCP = agents accessing tools
- A2A = agents collaborating with other agents
💡 Why It Matters: The Rise of the Multi-Agent AI Ecosystem
As enterprise adoption of agentic AI accelerates, interoperability becomes mission-critical. Most current systems rely on tightly coupled integrations and proprietary APIs that limit flexibility and scalability. A2A, by contrast, offers a vendor-neutral communication protocol that unlocks:
- Scalable agent collaboration across different vendors, stacks, and domains
- Reduced integration complexity, minimizing brittle connections and custom glue code
- Enhanced productivity, as agents can delegate and coordinate across workflows autonomously
- Lower operational costs, by enabling agents to function across systems without duplication
From autonomous customer support workflows to cross-agent orchestration in supply chains or recruitment processes, A2A opens the door to a new level of intelligent automation.
🛠️ Key Design Principles
According to Google’s team, A2A was built around five core principles:
- Agent-first architecture: Agents can collaborate even if they don’t share memory, tools, or context.
- Built on existing standards: HTTP, JSON-RPC, SSE — for easier enterprise adoption.
- Secure by default: With authentication/authorization parity with OpenAPI.
- Supports long-running tasks: Designed for everything from micro-tasks to multi-day workflows.
- Modality-agnostic: Supports not just text, but also images, audio, video, and more.
🧪 Real-World Use Case: Collaborative Candidate Hiring
A simple example: imagine a recruiter using an AI agent to find software engineer candidates. That agent can interact with other agents that specialize in candidate sourcing, scheduling, or background checks — all through A2A — without manual hand-offs or fragile integrations.
This use case can be generalized to dozens of other workflows: marketing, DevOps, HR, cybersecurity, R&D, and beyond.
🤝 Who’s Backing A2A?
A2A is supported by a broad coalition of industry leaders — both on the tech provider side (e.g., SAP, MongoDB, JetBrains, Datadog, LangChain, PayPal, Cohere) and enterprise consulting and systems integrators (e.g., Accenture, Deloitte, Capgemini, EPAM, Wipro, KPMG).
For instance:
- LangChain noted that “agent-to-agent communication is the near future,”
- SAP called it “a pivotal step toward end-to-end business process automation,”
- Accenture described A2A as “the bridge uniting domain-specific agents across diverse platforms.”
Their full testimonials can be read in the official announcement.
🔓 Open Source and Ready to Try
Google has released the full A2A protocol specification under an open-source license, and the code is now publicly available on GitHub:
👉 https://github.com/google/A2A
The repository includes:
- Draft spec documentation
- JSON schema samples
- Code examples and quick-start guides
- Contribution guidelines
Google has also confirmed it is actively working with partners to launch a production-ready version of A2A later in 2024.
🌐 A2A and the Future of AI Interoperability
A2A arrives at a pivotal time, as enterprise adoption of autonomous agents grows. Organizations are moving from isolated AI use cases toward collaborative systems of agents — each specialized, composable, and intelligent.
By providing a standardized communication layer, A2A enables the modular, secure, and scalable orchestration of these systems — positioning itself as a key enabler in the evolution of agentic AI infrastructure.
While it’s still early, A2A represents a meaningful first step in turning the vision of interoperable AI agents into a working, open reality.
📘 Learn more:
🔗 Official blog announcement (Google Developers)
🔗 GitHub repository with A2A spec & code
🧠 Will A2A become the new lingua franca for AI agents? The industry seems to think so.
