A Survey of AI Agent Protocols

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Title: A Survey of AI Agent Protocols
Presenter: Tapio Pitkäranta
Abstract: The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has led to the widespread deployment of LLM agents across diverse industries, including customer service, content generation, data analysis, and even healthcare. However, as more LLM agents are deployed, a major issue has emerged: there is no standard way for these agents to communicate with external tools or data sources. This lack of standardized protocols makes it difficult for agents to work together or scale effectively, and it limits their ability to tackle complex, real-world tasks. A unified communication protocol for LLM agents could change this. It would allow agents and tools to interact more smoothly, encourage collaboration, and triggering the formation of collective intelligence. In this paper, the authors provide the first comprehensive analysis of existing agent protocols, proposing a systematic two-dimensional classification that differentiates context-oriented versus inter-agent protocols and general-purpose versus domain-specific protocols. Additionally, they conduct a comparative performance analysis of these protocols across key dimensions such as security, scalability, and latency. Finally, they explore the future landscape of agent protocols by identifying critical research directions and characteristics necessary for next-generation protocols. These characteristics include adaptability, privacy preservation, and group-based interaction, as well as trends toward layered architectures and collective intelligence infrastructures. The authors expect this work to serve as a practical reference for both researchers and engineers seeking to design, evaluate, or integrate robust communication infrastructures for intelligent agents.
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