AI agents can talk to each other now — they just can’t understand what the other one is trying to do. That’s the problem Cisco’s Outshift is trying to solve with a new architectural approach it calls the Internet of Cognition.The gap is practical: protocols like MCP and A2A let agents exchange messages and identify tools, but they don’t share intent or context. Without that, multi-agent systems burn cycles on coordination and can’t compound what they learn.”The bottom line is, we can send messages, but agents do not understand each other, so there is no grounding, negotiation or coordination or common intent,” Vijoy Pandey, general manager and senior vice president of Outshift, told VentureBeat. The practical impact: Consider a patient scheduling a specialist appointment. With MCP alone, a symptom assessment agent passes a diagnosis code to a scheduling agent, which finds available appointments. An insurance agent verifies coverage. A pharmacy agent checks drug availability.Each agent completes its task, but none of them reasons together about the patient’s needs. The pharmacy agent might recommend a drug that conflicts with the patient’s history — information the symptom agent has but didn’t pass along because “potential drug interactions” wasn’t in its scope. The scheduling agent books the nearest available appointment without knowing the insurance agent found better coverage at a different facility.They’re connected, but they’re not aligned on the goal: Find the right care for this patient’s specific situation.Current protocols handle the mechanics of agent communication — MCP, A2A, and Outshift’s AGNTCY, which it donated to the Linux Foundation, let agents discover tools and exchange messages. But these operate at what Pandey calls the “connectivity and identification layer.” They handle syntax, not semantics.The missing piece is shared context and intent. An agent completing a task knows what it’s doing …
