IBM Wired 6 Agents With A2A. Then Couldn't Upgrade Them.
IBM's TLS platform standardized every agent boundary on A2A and every tool boundary on MCP, which let five of its six specialist agents be built by outside teams. It also left the platform team unable to push a better reasoning pattern into agents it doesn't own — even though every agent already imports the library that contains it.
August 26, 2026 · 14 min read