What’s new with Agents: ADK, Agent Engine, and A2A Enhancements

At Google, we envision a future where intelligent agents are not just tools, but collaborative partners in solving complex challenges, streamlining workflows, and unlocking new possibilities. We believe that empowering developers with a platform that offers flexibility, trust, and comprehensive capabilities is key to realizing this potential. Today, we’re thrilled to share a series of significant updates across our product portfolio that reflect this vision, designed to help you build and manage your intelligent agents with unprecedented ease and power.

These enhancements focus on providing robust development tools, intuitive management interfaces, and seamless agent-to-agent communications, delivering a stronger foundation for the next generation of AI powered solutions.

Building with confidence and flexibility: Agent Development Kit (ADK)

To empower you to create sophisticated agents with stability and adaptability, we’ve added significant innovations with our Agent Development Kit (ADK).

• Python ADK v1.0.0: Stability for Production-Ready Agents We’re excited to announce the v1.0.0 stable release of our Python Agent Development Kit. This milestone signifies that the Python ADK is now production-ready, offering a reliable and robust platform for developers to confidently build and deploy their agents in live environments. We’ve heard incredible feedback from customers using Agent Development Kit already, including Renault Group, Box, and Revionics.

• Java ADK v0.1.0: Extending Agent Capabilities to the Java Ecosystem Expanding our reach, we’re also launching the initial release of the Java ADK v0.1.0. This development brings the power and flexibility of the ADK to Java developers, enabling them to leverage its capabilities for their agent development needs.

To get started with the Java ADK, you can add the following dependency to your Maven project:

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.google.adk</groupId>
    <artifactId>google-adk</artifactId>
    <version>0.1.0</version>
</dependency>

XML

Intuitive control and management: The Agent Engine UI

The Vertex AI Agent Engine helps developers deploy, manage, and scale agents in production. We’re excited to now offer an Agent Engine UI to simplify the agent lifecycle in a more straightforward and centralized way. This user-friendly interface, accessible within the Google Cloud console, provides a comprehensive dashboard to view and manage your deployed agents, list sessions, trace and debug actions, and monitor your agents. This streamlined approach significantly enhances the development and management process, offering you greater control and deeper insights into your agent’s behavior and performance.

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Agent Engine UI: where you can inspect your deployed agents, see metrics (e.g. requests and CPU usage), sessions, check deployment details, and deep-dive into traces.

Seamless and secure collaboration: Advancing the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol

For agents to truly act as integral partners, they need to communicate effectively and securely with each other. We’re continuously improving the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol with our partners to facilitate more sophisticated and reliable interactions between your agents.

More Lightweight & Secure Interactions

Updated A2A protocol specification (v0.2) We’ve rolled out version 0.2 of our A2A protocol specification, incorporating key enhancements:

• Support for stateless interactions: This update simplifies development for scenarios where session management isn’t needed, leading to more efficient and lightweight communication.

• Standardized authentication: We’ve formalized authentication schemes based on an OpenAPI-like authentication schema. This ensures clear communication of authentication requirements across agents, bolstering security and reliability in agent-to-agent interactions.

Simplifying Integration with the A2A Python SDK

To make it easier for developers to leverage the A2A protocol, we’re releasing the official Python SDK for A2A. This dedicated Software Development Kit provides the tools you need to interact with and build using A2A, simplifying the integration of these powerful communication capabilities into your Python-based agents.

Growing Ecosystem Momentum with New A2A Partners

Industry adoption of A2A is accelerating rapidly. We’re already seeing platforms introduce enhanced capabilities for building, deploying, and securing A2A agents, which will help establish the infrastructure for the sophisticated multi-agent systems in the future. Simultaneously, companies are bringing A2A support to their existing agents, so that they can seamlessly communicate with other agents within this fast-growing ecosystem. Recent updates include:

• Box AI Agents transform unstructured content like scans and images into actionable data by extracting key details such as dates and contractual terms. By embracing A2A protocol, Box AI agents can securely collaborate with external agents for completing complex, multi-system processes directly where content lives.

• Microsoft announced support of the protocol in Azure AI Foundry to build A2A agents and ability to invoke any A2A agent in Microsoft Copilot Studio. Microsoft has also showcased how A2A can be used for workplace productivity use cases by invoking multiple A2A agents with Microsoft Entra Agent ID and Microsoft Graph.

• SAP is adding support for A2A protocol into their AI assistant Joule, which will enable Joule to orchestrate agents within SAP ecosystem and invoke A2A agents such as those built using Google ADK within the Joule user interface so that users can access agents across multiple systems to accomplish more tasks without switching context.

• Zoom announced support for A2A protocol and Agentspace integration, advancing multi-agent collaboration across its open platform.

Building the future, together

We are incredibly excited about these updates and believe they will empower you to build even more sophisticated, reliable, and impactful intelligent agent solutions. These advancements in our ADK, Agent Engine, and A2A protocol are designed to provide you with a comprehensive and flexible platform to bring your most ambitious agent-driven projects to life.

We are looking forward to seeing what you build next.

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Explore this announcement and all Google I/O 2025 updates on io.google starting May 22.