Agents that hand off work to other agents
Delegation is a protocol, not a fork. Agents discover peers, pass tasks with context, and track completion — across teams, tenants, or partner boundaries.
Single agents solve single problems. Real work is chains of specialists: a triage agent hands to a diagnostics agent hands to a remediation agent. A2A formalizes that chain so handoffs are typed, auditable, and reversible.
How handoff works
- 01
Discover
Agents publish their capabilities in a registry. Callers find them by capability, not by hardcoded identity.
- 02
Delegate
A task is handed off with typed context, a completion contract, and an SLA. The caller isn't blocked; the callee reports progress.
- 03
Track and reconcile
Every handoff is tracked end-to-end. If the callee fails, the caller is notified with enough context to recover or retry.
Capabilities
Cross-tenant
Agents in different tenants can delegate across trust boundaries with explicit policy.
Deadlines and timeouts
Every delegated task has a deadline. Missed deadlines trigger compensation or escalation automatically.
Chain-of-custody
Every hop is signed and auditable. You can reconstruct who did what, when, and on whose behalf.
Deadlock avoidance
Cycles and circular delegations are detected and broken before they consume the system.