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PM Tech Glossary Card of the Day

🔗 A2A Protocol — The New Standard Every PM Building AI Agents Needs to Know

A2A Protocol is how AI agents talk to each other — think HTTPS for AI agents. Now backed by 150+ orgs and Google, it's the new infrastructure layer every PM building agent products needs on their radar.

2026/05/12 15:30:15

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Your AI agent just finished a task. Now it needs to hand off to a ServiceNow agent — one your vendor built, not you.
Without a shared language, that's a custom integration every single time. A2A is the protocol that changes that.

Card 1 — What it is
A2A (Agent-to-Agent) is an open protocol so AI agents from different platforms can discover each other, pass tasks, and collaborate — without anyone writing custom glue code.
The short version: it's basically HTTPS for AI agents.
Announced by Google in April 2025. Hit 150+ organizations in production at Google Cloud Next '26 (April 22, 2026). Now governed by the Linux Foundation — AWS, Cisco, Microsoft, Salesforce, SAP, and ServiceNow are all founding members. No single vendor owns it.

Card 2 — How it fits in your agent stack
A2A works alongside Anthropic's MCP — they solve different problems:
MCP = your agent talking to tools (APIs, calendars, databases) A2A = your agent talking to other agents, across company and vendor lines
Both are already built into the major frameworks: LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, LlamaIndex Agents, Semantic Kernel. Your engineering team likely doesn't need to add A2A — it comes with the tools they're already using.

Card 3 — Who's already committed
150+ organizations confirmed in production — not pilot, not evaluation.
  • Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, AWS Bedrock: native support embedded
  • Salesforce Agentforce, SAP, ServiceNow: agents communicate via A2A
  • Confluent: added A2A to Apache Kafka in March 2026 for event-driven inter-agent messaging
  • Deloitte: connected 1,000+ pre-built industry agents through A2A
Sean Falconer, Head of AI at Confluent, put it plainly: "Businesses are going to be running hundreds or thousands of these things across all kinds of enterprise systems."

Card 4 — Your PM takeaway
If your team is building AI agents, A2A determines whether those agents can work with agents from other vendors.
With Big 3 cloud backing and 150+ orgs already live, A2A is becoming the TCP/IP of the agent economy.
Say this to your team: "A2A is basically HTTPS for AI agents — a standard so they can talk across vendors without custom glue code."
Sources: The Next Web · Google Cloud Next '26 · AgentLux · The New Stack / Confluent

#AIAgents #A2AProtocol #ProductManagement #TechLiteracy #AIInfrastructure #GoogleCloud #EnterpriseAI

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