3 posts tagged with "MCP"

This week, Google announced (↗) their new Agent-to-Agent protocol, A2A, designed to standardise how AI agents collaborate, even when run by different organisations using different underlying models. Positioned as complementary to MCP – which standardises agent access to external tools – A2A aims to standardise direct agent-agent communication. Google even declared A2A ♥️ MCP (↗), highlighting their vision for synergy between these protocols.

At Portia, we’ve been thinking about how agents interact with external systems via tools and agents for some time. You may have even read our post two weeks ago, Software interfaces in the agent era (↗). We divided the topic of agent integration with external systems into five categories based on increasing complexity, and A2A sits firmly at the top, in the Agent-Agent interface level.

For decades, APIs have been the standard for connecting software systems. Whether REST, gRPC, or GraphQL, APIs follow the same principle: well-structured interfaces that are defined ahead of time to expose data and functionality to third parties. But as AI Agents start taking on more autonomous operations this rigid model is limiting what they can do.

APIs work well when requirements are known in advance, but agents often lack full context at the start. They explore, iterate and adapt based on their goals and real-time learning. Relying solely on predefined API calls can restrict an agent’s ability to interact dynamically with software.

Like many in our industry, we have been dealing a lot with the challenges of agent to software interfaces. We think the future of these interfaces will move beyond static APIs toward more flexible, expressive, and adaptive mechanisms. More on our thinking below, we’d love to hear your thoughts!

Anthropic open sourced its Model Context Protocol (↗), or MCP for short, at the end of last year. The protocol is picking up steam as the go-to way to standardise the interface between agent frameworks and apps / data sources, with the list of official MCP server implementations (↗) growing rapidly. Our early users have already asked for an easy way to expose tools from an MCP server to a Portia client so we just released support for MCP servers in our SDK ⭐️.

In this blog post we show how you can combine the power of Portia AI’s abstractions with any tool set from an MCP server to create unique agent workflows. The example we go over is accessible in our agent examples repository here (↗).