The walled garden cracks: Nadella bets Microsoft’s Copilots—and Azure’s next act

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, has thrown his company’s hat into the ring of companies backing Google’s Agent2Agent (A2A) open protocol and Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP).
These protocols standardise communication between AI agents, allowing them to collaborate and exchange tasks, requests and results seamlessly, regardless of vendor or platform.
Nadella has long supported the concept of open standards to drive AI adoption, and his public endorsement of A2A and MCP will lead to greater industry adoption, shifting from proprietary ecosystems to cross-platform agentic AI collaboration.
Advantages include the ability to integrate multi-vendor AI workflows, avoid vendor lock-in, and enable composability across diverse platforms.
Standard protocols also simplify auditing and compliance, and ensure security and scalability across all platforms.
This collective industry support will accelerate the development and adoption of innovative agentic AI apps and platforms.

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