Inter-Agent Communication

Problem

Wiring each pair of agents together with bespoke integration code does not scale. Every new agent forces fresh glue against every other agent it might talk to, and every change to one side breaks the others. There is no shared catalogue of what each agent can do, no shared auth story, and no shared way to version the request envelopes. The cost of adding the fourth or fifth agent becomes prohibitive long before the organisation has the agent population it wanted.

Solution

Adopt a protocol (Google A2A, Anthropic MCP, in-house equivalents) that covers capability advertisement, task delegation, result return, and auth. Agents advertise capabilities; clients discover and invoke; results round-trip in typed envelopes.

When to use

• Multiple agents must exchange tasks, capabilities, or results across process or vendor boundaries.
• Bespoke point-to-point integrations are starting to multiply.
• A protocol like MCP or A2A is available and acceptable to the operating environment.