Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference North America 2026

Special-purpose agentic systems can access proprietary enterprise information or private user information, such as financial, health, or employment data, that isn’t available to large public LLMs. But, by their nature, specialized agents are limited to specialized knowledge. However, more complex applications can be composed of several collaborating agents, each with a specific expertise.
Manual integration of information from several agents by users is possible, but time-consuming and clumsy, and the agents wouldn’t benefit from each other’s knowledge. A better approach would be for agents to converse directly with each other. A standard messaging protocol would enable independent agents to converse and collaborate on tasks.
This presentation will outline two protocols that enable multi-agent systems to collaborate. The first is the Linux Foundation’s Agent-to-Agent protocol, and the second is the Linux Foundation AI & Data Open Voice Interoperability Initiative’s Open Floor Protocol. We will describe each protocol and explain how they complement one another with demonstrations of collaborating agents.