Inter-Agent Communication
Adopt a standard protocol (MCP, A2A) for agents to advertise capabilities, delegate tasks, and return results across process and vendor boundaries.
Intent & Description
🎯 Intent
Define a protocol for agents to exchange tasks, capabilities, and results across process or vendor boundaries.
📋 Context
An organisation has agents built by different teams or bought from different vendors — a legal review agent from one supplier, an HR agent from another, an internal IT agent. They need to cooperate on workflows that cross their boundaries, but each speaks a different internal shape: different request envelopes, different result formats, different auth.
💡 Solution
Adopt a protocol (Google A2A, Anthropic MCP, or in-house equivalent) covering capability advertisement, task delegation, result return, and auth. Agents advertise capabilities; clients discover and invoke; results round-trip in typed envelopes.
Real-world Use Case
- Multiple agents must exchange tasks, capabilities, or results across process or vendor boundaries.
- Bespoke point-to-point integrations are starting to multiply and diverge.
- A protocol like MCP or A2A is available and acceptable to the operating environment.
Source
📌 TL;DR
Adopt MCP, A2A, or an equivalent protocol for cross-boundary agent communication — capability advertisement, typed task delegation, and result envelopes beat bespoke point-to-point every time.
Advantages
- Cross-team and cross-vendor reuse without bespoke integration code.
- Capability inventory becomes inspectable — you can see what every agent advertises.
Disadvantages
- Protocol overhead adds engineering cost upfront.
- Schema versioning becomes everyone’s problem — all agents must evolve schemas together.