The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica When AI Agents Need to Talk: Inside the A2A Protocol
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Oct 16, 2025 Heiko Hotz and Sokratis Kartakis, engineers at Google Cloud, delve into the Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol, a groundbreaking standard for AI collaboration across different frameworks. They discuss the importance of statefulness and security in multi-agent systems. With real-world examples, they illustrate how specialized agents communicate similarly to business cards. The duo also highlights the A2A’s potential to transform enterprise communication while addressing security concerns and developer ease of adoption, marking a significant step for future AI interactions.
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Why Standard Agent Communication Matters
- Developers build agents with many frameworks and will want them to interoperate without reworking application code.
- A shared protocol lets teams plug new agents into systems by describing capabilities, not rewriting integrations.
Agents Require Stateful Protocols
- Agents differ from APIs because they are stateful and can run tasks asynchronously with updates.
- A protocol must support long-running tasks, status updates, and background work rather than one-shot calls.
When To Use Tools Versus Agents
- MCP targets tool invocation with structured schemas and one-shot calls, while A2A exposes agents via natural language descriptions and stateful tasks.
- Use tools when fixed schemas suffice and agents when open-ended, interactive behavior is needed.