Platform team connecting internal AI agents to third-party agents
Use the A2A protocol to let your AI employees collaborate with external agents as peers, not just tools.
Give Your Employee an External AI Agent
Point an employee at any external A2A (agent-to-agent) agent's URL and it becomes a tool the employee can call on its own. Sistava fetches the agent's public Agent Card, turns each of its skills into a usable tool automatically, and keeps them refreshed as the remote agent changes. No manual mapping of inputs or outputs required.
Your employees can reach out to other AI agents using Google's Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol. Discover external agents, understand their capabilities, send them tasks, and receive structured results back. Your workforce collaborates with AI agents beyond your organization.
This enables multi-agent workflows that span systems. Your research employee discovers a specialized data analysis agent, sends it a dataset, and incorporates the results into a report. Your sales employee finds a lead enrichment agent, sends a company name, and gets back detailed firmographic data. Agent-to-agent collaboration, not just tool calling.
A2A connections are scoped per employee, just like MCP. Your engineering employee talks to code review agents. Your marketing employee talks to content analysis agents. Each employee connects to the agents relevant to its role.
Setting one up is a URL and nothing else. Paste the external agent's address into an employee's Tools tab and Sistava reads that agent's public card, the small file it publishes describing who it is and what it can do, then turns each skill it lists into a tool your employee can call by name. You never map inputs, write a schema, or maintain a translation layer in between, and when the remote agent gains a skill it appears on the next refresh.
The connection is deliberately careful about where it will go. Before anything is fetched, the address is resolved and checked, and anything pointing at a private network or an internal address is refused, so a pasted URL cannot be turned into a way to reach inside your own infrastructure. Each call is a self contained request with a time limit on it, so a slow or unresponsive agent ends the attempt rather than leaving your employee waiting on it.
In practice the external agent behaves like any other tool in the employee's kit. Your employee decides when a task is a fit, sends it across, waits for the result, and folds what came back into whatever it was already doing. You see the request and the response in the conversation, so a delegated step reads as plainly as a web search or an email, and anything that needs your approval still stops and asks you first.
Plug Into the Broader Agent Ecosystem
Agent-to-Agent (A2A) is Google's open protocol for AI agents to communicate and delegate tasks to each other across different platforms and vendors. Sistava supports A2A, meaning your AI employee can connect to and delegate work to external AI agents built on any A2A-compatible system.
This is the foundation of true multi-agent orchestration across organizational boundaries. Your AI employee does not have to do everything itself. It can identify the right external agent for a specialized task and delegate to it, just as a human would route work to a specialist.
Delegate Without Losing Control
When your AI employee delegates to an A2A agent, it sends a structured task, waits for a result, and incorporates that result into its broader workflow. The whole interaction is logged and visible to you, so you always know what was delegated and what came back.
Your employee remains the orchestrator. It decides when to delegate, which external agent to use, and how to use the response. You retain full visibility and control over the overall workflow even when third-party agents are involved.
Future-Proof Integration with the Agent Internet
A2A is rapidly becoming the standard handshake protocol for autonomous agents across the industry. By supporting A2A today, Sistava positions your AI workforce to interoperate with the growing ecosystem of specialized agents being built by Google, Salesforce, SAP, and hundreds of other vendors.
As the A2A ecosystem matures, your AI employees gain access to more specialist agents without any additional setup. Connecting to the agent ecosystem through an open standard means your investment in Sistava compounds over time.
How It Works
Your AI employees delegate tasks to external AI agents on other platforms using the Google A2A protocol, with full traceability on both ends.
Register an external A2A agent by providing its endpoint and capability description. Your AI employee can then delegate work to it the same way it delegates to teammates. The A2A protocol handles authentication, message formatting, and response routing. Your agent does not know or care whether a task is handled by an internal team member or an external agent on another vendor's platform.
This opens up multi-vendor agent workflows without building custom integrations. A Sistava employee can hand off specialized work to a compliance agent on a legal platform, a design agent on a creative tool, or a trading agent on a fintech system. The delegation is logged in your activity feed with the full request and response chain so nothing is a black box.
The refresh is what keeps this low maintenance. Each connection reads the remote agent's published card rather than a copy you wrote down once, so when that agent adds a skill, renames one, or retires one, your employee's tool list follows without you editing anything. A connection you set up once keeps working as the agent on the other end evolves.
Use Cases
Enterprise team building a multi-agent workflow across systems
Internal AI employees delegate to external A2A agents and get results back. Complex workflows span systems automatically.
Product team integrating a specialized external agent into their workforce
Connect a third-party A2A agent as a capability. Your AI employee calls on it when the task demands it.
Developer building an interoperable AI workforce
A2A makes your agents and external agents speak the same language. Collaboration happens without custom glue code.
Comparison
| Before | After |
|---|---|
| AI agents from different platforms cannot communicate with each other. | A2A protocol lets your AI employees work alongside any compatible agent. |
| Integrating external agents requires custom API work every time. | A2A is a standard protocol, connect compatible agents immediately. |
| Multi-agent workflows break at system boundaries. | A2A bridges systems so the workflow continues uninterrupted. |
| Specialized external agents sit unused because they can't connect. | Any A2A-compatible agent becomes part of your workforce. |
FAQ
What is the A2A protocol?
A2A (Agent-to-Agent) is an open protocol developed by Google that defines how AI agents from different platforms can communicate, delegate tasks, and share results. It enables interoperability across the growing ecosystem of AI agents.
Which A2A agents can my Sistava employee connect to?
Any agent that implements the A2A protocol. This includes agents built on Google's Agent Development Kit, and any other A2A-compatible system. The list of compatible agents grows as the ecosystem adopts the standard.
Can I see what my AI employee delegated to an external A2A agent?
Yes. All A2A interactions are logged in the conversation history, including the task sent, the external agent's response, and how your AI employee used that response in the broader workflow.
Does using A2A agents affect my billing?
Sistava bills based on your AI employee's activity. Delegating to an A2A agent counts as tool usage by your employee. Any costs charged by the external A2A agent are separate and governed by that agent's provider.
Can my Sistava agent collaborate with AI agents from other platforms?
Yes. The A2A protocol allows your AI employee to communicate and delegate tasks to agents built on other systems that support the standard. This makes cross-platform multi-agent workflows possible.
How do I connect an external AI agent to my employee?
Open that employee's Tools tab and paste the external agent's URL. Sistava reads the agent's public card, discovers the skills it advertises, and turns each one into a tool that employee can call, with no schema to write and no input mapping on your side. The connection is scoped to that employee, so each one reaches only the agents its role actually needs.
What happens if the external agent is offline or slow?
Every call carries a time limit, so an agent that does not answer ends the attempt instead of leaving your employee hanging on it. Your employee sees that the step failed and either carries on with the rest of the task or tells you, rather than stalling silently. Because each call is self contained with no session held open, a failure leaves nothing half finished behind it.
Is it safe to point my employee at an outside agent's URL?
The address is resolved and checked before anything is fetched, and anything that lands on a private network or an internal address is refused, so a pasted URL cannot be turned into a way to reach inside your own systems. Only the task your employee chooses to send is shared with that agent, and the whole exchange is visible in the conversation so you can see what left and what came back.
Our Sista agent now delegates legal review tasks to an external compliance agent automatically. We cut review turnaround from three days to a few hours.
Where Give Your Employee an External AI Agent fits
Give Your Employee an External AI Agent is part of Things they connect to.
Connect your AI agents to Gmail, Slack, Notion, Jira, HubSpot, and thousands more apps with one-click OAuth. Extend their reach with MCP servers and A2A agents for AI-to-AI interoperability, or call any REST or GraphQL API directly. Each connection is scoped per employee.
- Things they connect to: 1,000+ tools. One click to connect.
Read the guide
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