expectedwrong hindsight

A2A Is the One

Google's agent interoperability protocol has the right pieces, the right backers, and the only company that could actually make it stick.

2 min read 269 words #ai #agents #google #standards #interoperability
hindsight — still happening

A2A gained traction but hasn't become the universal standard yet. The distribution argument was right — Google's coalition matters — but MCP ate more of the interop mindshare than expected. Still too early to call.

Google shipped A2A today — Agent-to-Agent, a protocol for making AI agents from different vendors, frameworks, and platforms actually talk to each other — and I think this is the one that lands.

The spec is clean. Agents advertise their capabilities through an Agent Card, a JSON file sitting at a well-known URL. Client agents discover remote agents, send them tasks over HTTP, stream results back. Complementary to MCP rather than competing with it — MCP connects agents to tools and data, A2A connects agents to other agents. The pieces are all there.

But the protocol is almost beside the point. Standards don't win because they're good. They win because someone with distribution makes them unavoidable.

Google launched this with Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Workday, and roughly fifty other enterprise software companies who collectively own the business software stack — the same stack that every company's AI agents will need to reach into. That list is not an accident. That is Google calling in a decade of cloud enterprise relationships in a single morning.

Microsoft could theoretically do this. They have the enterprise footprint. But they are three competing agent frameworks deep and still haven't shipped a clean interop story, which is its own kind of answer.

Google is more desperate and better positioned at the same time — which is a strange place to be, but it makes them move faster. They have the model, the cloud, the enterprise partners, and now the open protocol with the momentum behind it.

A2A is probably the thing. The graveyard of unopened standards specs will not notice the absence of this one.