How industry efforts aim to help AI agents communicate better

If the tech industry is to be believed, an army of chatty computerized coworkers is headed to your office, in the form of AI agents. Within individual companies or industries, they may already be there. But just like on-boarding a human hire usually involves many new logins, these digital drudges aren’t much use without access to at least some of the constellation of platforms that make up a modern workplace. And while they won’t be rehashing last night’s game at the watercooler, they do still need to talk to each other. These are the kinds of problems that emerging industry standardization efforts are trying to tackle. Model Context Protocol (MCP), first introduced by Anthropic, is designed to plug agents into various software tools and data sources. Google’s Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol, which debuted this April, aims to let agents communicate, even across different vendors. Like any attempt to coordinate among varying companies, these cross-compatibility efforts can involve a tricky balance of different needs and interests. And while MCP and A2A are among the most popular at the moment, other options exist, like IBM’s Agent Communication Protocol (ACP) or Oxford University’s Agora. While it’s still very early days for these frameworks, experts said some form of communication and coordination will be needed for companies to realize their ambitions for agentic workplaces.