BREAKING NEWS: Google launches A2A (Agent-To-Agent) Protocol.

MCP isn't the only thing anymore.

Shockingly, this DOESN"T CHANGE EVERYTHING.

It's very, very early -- but here are my initial thoughts:

• I'm a big believer in multi-agent networks and agent-to-agent communication. It's good that there's now an open standard out there for it.

• They cover some very key needs: capability discovery, agents being able to send messages to each other, being able to work on tasks that are long-lived (async), weaving in human UX into the agentic flow, etc.

• This is not a replacement for MCP (Model Context Protocol). In fact, in their announcement post, Google included a helpful diagram (shown below) that illustrates how A2A and MCP fit together.

• This feels a bit "heavy" to me -- it's trying to do a lot. In a way, that's good, because you get a bunch of capabilities out of the box like async tasks and user experience negotiation. But the tradeoff is that heavier protocols are harder to implement and as such don't get the quick adoption you see with lighter weight things. So, I don't anticipate MCP-style adoption.

• Reading between the lines, this feels like they're solving a lot for mega enterprises -- and big consulting firms looking to build multi-agent systems inside the corporation. It's less about connecting agents across orgs. But, I could be wrong.

Will be interesting to see actual, usable implementations of this outside the Fortune 1000 companies.

Overall, this is good news though. Moves us further down the multi-agent systems road.

Author

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