When AI Agents Need to Talk: Inside the A2A Protocol

The podcast explores the concept of agent-to-agent (A2A) communication protocols, questioning why they are needed when single-agent tooling is still developing. It highlights A2A as a forward-looking protocol enabling agents built on different frameworks to communicate and collaborate without requiring code changes. Heiko Hotz and Sokratis Kartakis from Google Cloud explain A2A's relationship with existing protocols like MCP, emphasizing that A2A focuses on connecting agents, while MCP is specific to tools. They draw an analogy between MCP and a vending machine, and A2A and a concierge, to illustrate the difference. The discussion covers the agent stack, security concerns, and the potential use of large action models, as well as the current state of A2A adoption.