Arize AI and the Future of Agent Interoperability: Embracing Google’s A2A Protocol
Richard Young
Director, Partner Solutions Architecture
We’re excited to announce that Arize AI is partnering with Google as a launch partner for the Agent Interop Protocol (A2A), an open standard enabling seamless communication between AI agents across different platforms and organizational boundaries.
What is Agent Interop Protocol (A2A)?
The Agent Interop Protocol (A2A) addresses a fundamental challenge in today’s AI ecosystem: enabling different AI agents to collaborate effectively without sharing internal resources. As specialized AI agents proliferate across various frameworks, A2A creates a standardized way for “opaque agents” – those operating across business, policy, or competitive boundaries – to work together while respecting organizational boundaries.
Another way to think about this: Where Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a protocol that standardizes connection of LLM-based applications to information, resources, and tools, A2A is a protocol that standardizes collaboration between autonomous agents.
This protocol establishes a universal language and interaction framework allowing AI agents to coordinate regardless of who built them or what technology they use – all while maintaining security and privacy controls.
Why Agent Interoperability Matters
- The fragmentation of today’s AI agent ecosystem creates several challenges:
- Increasing variability of frameworks to build agents
- Difficulty in representing an “agent as a tool” given multimodal, unstructured, dynamic interaction with users.
- Agents across (business, policy, competitive) boundaries cannot share tools, memory, plans, thoughts, etc.
A2A addresses these issues through four foundational capabilities:
- Capability Discovery: Agents can advertise their abilities, enabling clients to utilize them for specific tasks.
- User Experience Negotiation: Clients and agents can agree on appropriate communication methods.
- Task and State Management: Clear mechanisms for communicating task status and dependencies.
- Dynamic Collaboration: Support for agents to request clarifications or additional information as needed.
Arize AI’s Role in A2A
As agents begin to collaborate across organizational boundaries, the ability to trace interactions, evaluate performance, identify failures and observe behavior at each agent level becomes even more critical.
As an AI observability and evaluation platform, Arize’s mission is to make AI systems more transparent, reliable, and trustworthy. Our involvement in the A2A Protocol further extends this mission into the emerging world of autonomous agents. Our expertise in tracing, evaluation, and observability for AI systems—including our OpenTelemetry-compliant architecture—makes Arize uniquely positioned to support and enhance this standard, regardless of the type of agent development framework or approach taken.
“Arize AI is proud to partner with Google as a launch partner for the A2A interoperability protocol. A2A represents a meaningful advancement toward seamless, secure interaction across AI agents,” says Jason Lopatecki, Cofounder & CEO of Arize AI. “Arize’s commitment to open-source evaluation and observability frameworks positions us uniquely to help define and enhance this open standard.”
The Path Forward
We invite developers, enterprises, and AI practitioners to explore how the A2A Protocol can transform their agent architectures. By embracing open standards for agent interoperability, we can collectively build a more connected, capable, and trustworthy AI ecosystem.
For organizations looking to prepare for this next wave of AI innovation, Arize’s observability platform provides the foundation needed to confidently deploy and optimize agents in both standalone and collaborative contexts.
Read Google’s announcement here.
Learn More
Explore how Arize is helping teams trace, evaluate, and improve AI systems at scale, or book a demo.