A High-IQ Network Is Not a Smart Network. Here Is What Is Missing
Cisco, Tuesday, July 28th, 2026
Cisco explains how the emerging A2A standard lets independent network AI agents coordinate alongside MCP.
A network full of independent AI agents is not automatically a smart network, because agents that cannot coordinate produce conflicting local optimizations.
Cisco explains how the emerging agent-to-agent standard lets those agents negotiate and share state, working alongside the Model Context Protocol that connects agents to tools.
The post uses SD-WAN as the worked example, showing how isolated decision-makers become a cooperative system. It covers what A2A specifies and where it sits relative to MCP.
The argument is that coordination protocols, not model quality, are the current constraint on network automation.