# Inter-Agent Communication

> Adopt a standard protocol (MCP, A2A) for agents to advertise capabilities, delegate tasks, and return results across process and vendor boundaries.

- **Category**: Agentic AI
- **Subcategory**: Multi-Agent
- **Canonical URL**: https://designpattern.fyi/patterns/inter_agent_communication/

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## 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.



## Use Cases
- 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.






## Trade-offs


### Advantages

- Cross-team and cross-vendor reuse without bespoke integration code.

- Capability inventory becomes inspectable — you can see what every agent advertises.




### Considerations & Drawbacks

- Protocol overhead adds engineering cost upfront.

- Schema versioning becomes everyone's problem — all agents must evolve schemas together.







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**Reference**: [Original Source](https://www.agentpatternscatalog.org/patterns/inter-agent-communication/)