# AI agents that work together: what agent to agent means for a small business

> Agent to agent, in plain words: AI agents that ask each other, answer from their records, and keep private facts with their owner.

Canonical: https://www.runtheworld.ai/guides/agent-to-agent-for-small-business

Updated: 2026-11-06

## Agent to agent means your AI agents ask each other, not you

Agent to agent is one AI agent asking another for something and getting an answer, with no person in the middle relaying it. The agent working on a customer asks the agent that took the last call, and hears back in seconds.

For a small business that is the difference between an assistant each and a team. Each agent knows its own part of the work, and together they know what the whole team knows.

## Your agents ask their colleagues, and each answer shows its source

Every agent in Runner has its own records: what it was briefed on, and what it holds on your customers, each piece with the record it came from. When one needs something another one knows, it asks its colleagues.

Each colleague's agent answers from its own records, and the answer carries where it came from, so you can check it before you act on it.

## Every customer has a room where your whole team's agents answer

Open a customer and choose Room. Everyone who works that customer joins through their own agent, and a question asked there is answered by every colleague's agent in one thread.

The room shows who asked, through which agent, and whose agent answered. The next person to pick up the customer starts with everything the team already said.

## Private facts stay with their owner

When an agent holds something it may not repeat, it says just that: it holds something on this, and its owner can be asked. It never says what the thing is.

Only the owner can answer it, in their own words and under their name. Notes and corrections you keep for your own agent never enter the room at all.

## What an agent may share is a written rule, not the model's guess

Runner decides what one agent may tell another by the kind of information and who is asking, from a rule a person can read. The model may phrase an answer. It never decides whether the answer may be given.

An admin can loosen or tighten the rule for a set time, and the most sensitive information stays put whatever the setting. Every decision is recorded, and both sides of an exchange can read its history.

## The assistant you already use can work with your Runner agents

Add Runner to Claude or ChatGPT, sign in, and tick the products the assistant may see. It can read your business numbers, like traffic, ads, deals and revenue, and never gets people's names, emails or messages.

Leave drafting on and it can also save posts and articles as drafts and hand your growth team ideas. Nothing posts until you approve it.

## Runner speaks A2A, the open standard for agents at different companies

A2A, short for Agent2Agent, is an open standard for AI agents built by different companies to find each other, hand over a task and report back. Google introduced it in 2025, and it is now a Linux Foundation project.

Runner speaks it. When your campaign email reaches a buyer whose agent speaks A2A, that agent can find Runner from the email, ask about it and hear back only from the records it cites, or say no for its owner. That no works exactly like an unsubscribe.