What Is the A2A Protocol, and Why Should a Manufacturer Care?
Something changed in B2B purchasing while most of us were watching the chatbots. According to research Deloitte published in June 2026, 40 percent of B2B buyers already use agentic AI somewhere in their purchasing process. On the sell side, 24 percent of suppliers use agents, 67 percent say they plan to, and only 11 percent actually have them in production.
Read those numbers again. The demand side of industrial commerce is automating faster than the supply side is preparing for it. That gap is going to decide who gets found, quoted, and ordered from over the next few years.
The plumbing behind this shift has a name: the Agent2Agent protocol, or A2A.
What A2A actually is
A2A is an open standard that lets AI agents built by different companies, on different platforms, discover each other, exchange tasks, and transact securely. Google launched it in April 2025 with more than 50 technology partners. It was donated to the Linux Foundation in June 2025, reached its stable v1.0 specification in March 2026, and in August 2026 it moved into the Agentic AI Foundation, the same Linux Foundation body that governs MCP, the standard for connecting agents to data and tools. More than 150 organizations back it, including Microsoft, AWS, Google, SAP, Salesforce, and ServiceNow, and their platforms already speak it.
A useful way to keep the two standards straight: MCP is how your agents connect to your own systems. A2A is how they talk to everyone else's.
The mechanism that matters most for a manufacturer is small and almost boring: a file called an Agent Card. It is a machine-readable business card, published at a standard address on your website, that tells other agents who you are, what you can do, how to talk to you, and how to authenticate. No card means no discovery. You are simply not on the map the agents are reading.
Why a manufacturer should care
Picture the procurement chain you already live in. An EPC firm is sourcing equipment for a project. Increasingly, the first pass of that sourcing is done by a software agent: checking specs, requesting quotes, comparing lead times across every vendor it can reach, at any hour, in minutes.
The vendors that can answer, machine to machine, make that first-pass shortlist. The vendors that cannot are not losing the negotiation. They were never in it.
For manufacturers, distributors, and rep firms, this is the same transition the phone, the fax, the website, and the online catalog each forced in their day. The businesses that were reachable through the new channel early took share from the ones that waited.
An honest word about maturity
A2A is early. Those 150+ organizations are backers, not proof of production deployments, and real machine-to-machine purchasing in industrial supply chains is still mostly pilots. Anyone telling you the agent economy has already arrived is selling urgency.
But the standard just stabilized, the major platforms already support it, and adjacent pieces are falling into place, including AP2, a protocol extension for authorized agent payments launched with more than 60 payment industry partners. Readiness is cheap now and expensive later, and readiness done properly includes the unglamorous parts: authentication, signed Agent Cards, and endpoints that answer from your real catalog data instead of a stale brochure.
The companies that treat this like infrastructure, not hype, will be the ones the agents find first.
Sources: Deloitte, "B2B agentic commerce" (June 2026); Google Developers Blog (April 2025); Linux Foundation press (June 2025); Agentic AI Foundation announcement (August 2026); A2A protocol specification v1.0 (March 2026); Google Cloud AP2 announcement (September 2025).