Why Agents Need a Protocol
Discover how A2A standardizes agent communication, enabling secure, efficient, and language-agnostic collaboration across teams.
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Suppose that there are five teams, and each one is building a helpful “robot coworker.” One is in Python, another in JavaScript, and a third runs on a vendor cloud. Two are also experimental internal tools built with agentic frameworks like CrewAI and LangGraph. Now, the company wants them to handle a customer request together: plan a trip, check inventory, price it, and invoice it. Without shared rules, every pair invents a private handshake: custom data shapes, one-off tokens, inconsistent errors, and fragile fixes. It’s slow and brittle. One update leads to a break in four links; nobody can trace what happened, and security gets patchy.
A protocol is simply a playbook that stops the chaos. It standardizes how agents introduce themselves (capabilities), ask for work (requests), share progress (streaming), fail safely (errors), and prove permissions (authorization). With that in place, teams build once and reuse everywhere, making the whole process clear, safe, and predictable. And that’s exactly where A2A comes in. ...