Agent Orchestration

This use case provides the data, skills, and capabilities that artificial intelligence agents used internally can use to automate and orchestrate tasks while discovering and negotiating with other agents to accomplish specific goals. This use case employs the open-source Agent-to-Agent (A2A) specification to securely and confidently enable agentic activity across operations.

As teams focus on responding to this AI moment and deploying MCP servers on top of existing APIs and other tooling, they need to begin understanding how to implement agentic automation and orchestration on top of MCP servers. Teams need structure and guidance when it comes to authentication and authorization, discovery, governance, and all the standardization required to deploy agents at scale.

Pain Points

• High complexity in standardizing message formats and handshakes across agents
• Difficult to cap liability; risk of hallucinated agreements
• Requires vetting external agents; security risks at agent boundaries
• High debugging difficulty; “Black Box” interactions across agent chains

Expected Outcomes

• Universal connectivity: “Write once, talk to many”
• Removal of human bottlenecks in approval chains
• Access to dynamic markets and real-time supply chains via agent automation
• Modular system enabling easy replacement of underperforming agents

Narrative

Automation is a top priority for leadership, and properly defining and preparing for automation is a priority for teams. Teams are hard at work translating relevant API infrastructure into MCP servers while data, API, and compliance teams collaborate to standardize how MCP solutions are delivered across internal and external integrations.

While teams focus on delivering, sustaining, and governing their API resources—as well as ensuring their copilots are supported—the organization aims to provide the guidance, standards, and tooling they need to automate the resources and tasks central to their work. Agent-to-Agent (A2A) provides the blueprint, supplying a standards-based, governed framework for consistent and effective agentic automation alongside existing automation strategies.

Discovery of MCP servers, APIs, and existing data sources is a top priority. Standardizing the messages, tasks, and other artifacts in motion across teams comes next. Compliance partners are deeply focused on authentication, authorization, and the overall scope of enterprise tooling being accessed via agentic automation.

The goal is to reduce complexity and risk for teams while removing bottlenecks related to risk and compliance. A2A provides the scaffolding needed; the deeper understanding of how it fits into the existing enterprise landscape comes from mapping it to the practices of progressive teams.