Agentic Architectures — Article 4: Agentic Protocols (MCP and A2A)

Interoperability and the “Connective Tissue” of AI Every mature technology ecosystem eventually hits the same wall. Early on, everyone builds their own integrations — custom API wrappers, bespoke data formats, proprietary communication layers. It works, until the ecosystem grows large enough that the integration cost becomes the dominant cost. Then someone proposes a standard, half the industry argues about it for two years, and eventually something wins. The agentic AI ecosystem is hitting that wall right now. A year ago, if you wanted your agent to read files from your local filesystem, query your database, and post a summary to Slack, you wrote three custom integrations. If you wanted two agents from different vendors to hand off a task, you wrote a custom serialization format and hoped both sides agreed on what “done” meant. Every team was solving the same plumbing problems independently, and none of the pipes connected. Two protocols are emerging to fix this. The Model Context Pro