With the rise of Anthropic’s MCP (& quickly becoming one of the emerging open standards) and Google’s recent announcement of the Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A), it’s clear the technology world is racing full-speed toward laying the foundations of the A2A economy.

What I initially thought would take years is now unfolding in mere months — a recurring pattern in the world of AI. What’s especially exciting about the acceleration toward standardization and interoperability between AI agents is that it doesn’t just enable more conversations — it also sets the foundation for digital transactions to explode, ushering in the Cambrian era of AI agents: the beginning of the A2A economy.

At Sendbird, we envision a future where the volume of conversations and transactions between AI agents will easily surpass those between humans — by 10x to 100x. Information exchange, routing (the AI equivalent of intros), auctioning & bidding, negotiation, logistics, transactions, and even post-transaction activities will all be facilitated through these types of emerging protocols.

If we look back at the history of protocols (USB-A to USB-C, for instance), the first attempts were clunky with plenty of room for improvement. But the hard part was never perfecting the technology — it was gaining acknowledgment and widespread adoption from the ecosystem. With MCP servers spreading like wildfire, it feels like it’s a matter of weeks and months, not years and decades, before these new standards become the default for AI agents.

As the world scrambles to figure out how their businesses can fit into, and benefit from the A2A economy, it’s super exciting to see the biggest forces in tech race to stake their claims on standardization. Sometimes, industries converge on a single standard (USB-C evolving from USB-A; VHS winning over Betamax). Other times, multiple formats coexist depending on the use case (e.g., music industry’s MP3, AAC, WAV, FLAC).

It’s also important to remember that standards don’t necessarily win because they are technologically superior — they win through faster adoption and broader mindshare (Bitcoin vs. Ethereum — hopefully we’ll find out who the ultimate winner is in the next decade). Regardless, we’re thrilled to see the ecosystem coming together to enable the interoperability of AI agents and to help usher in the A2A economy.