New Course: ACP: Agent Communication Protocol
Learn to build agents that communicate and collaborate across different frameworks using ACP in this short course built with @IBMResearch's BeeAI, and taught by @sandi_besen, AI Research Engineer & Ecosystem Lead at IBM, and @nicholasrenotte, Head of AI Developer Advocacy at IBM.
Building a multi-agent system with agents built or used by different teams and organizations can become challenging. You may need to write custom integrations each time a team updates their agent design or changes their choice of agentic orchestration framework.
The Agent Communication Protocol (ACP) is an open protocol that addresses this challenge by standardizing how agents communicate, using a unified RESTful interface that works across frameworks. In this protocol, you host an agent inside an ACP server, which handles requests from an ACP client and passes them to the appropriate agent. Using a standardized client-server interface allows multiple teams to reuse agents across projects. It also makes it easier to switch between frameworks, replace an agent with a new version, or update a multi-agent system without refactoring the entire system.
In this…
multi-agent — Using several AI agents on one problem — splitting work in parallel, checking each other, or filling different roles like planner and reviewer.
AI agent — An AI system that doesn't just answer once but works toward a goal in a loop — taking actions, reading the results, and deciding what to do next.
MCP — The Model Context Protocol — an open standard that lets any AI assistant plug into any tool or data source without custom integration code.
Why it matters
ACP standardizes AI agentAn AI system that doesn't just answer once but works toward a goal in a loop — taking actions, reading the results, and deciding what to do next.Full definition →-to-agent calls behind one REST interface so teams can swap frameworks or agent versions without refactoring the whole system — and it clarifies where MCPThe Model Context Protocol — an open standard that lets any AI assistant plug into any tool or data source without custom integration code.Full definition → and A2A each fit.
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