Walking Tokyo Talking Agent Protocols

Two people, a wrong turn into a back alley, a community garden, and about thirty minutes of arguing about protocols on the streets of Tokyo.

The guest is Angie Jones, VP of Developer Experience at the Agentic AI Foundation, fresh off launching AGNTCon + MCPCon in China before the Tokyo stop. She opens with what she learned there: a mobile-first, super-app world where the integration problem most of us obsess over barely exists, where every conversation about agents is really a conversation about the model, and where companies are now reaching for MCP and A2A precisely because they want to operate outside that ecosystem.The bulk of it is WebMCP - a protocol with a confusing name and, until recently, almost no attention. The pitch: put tool calling in the page itself, so your agent works inside your logged-in session with only the tools relevant to the page you're on, instead of screenshotting an anonymous browser and burning tokens guessing at the accessibility tree. Angie explains why it went from ignored to urgent the moment agentic browsing got good, and why the fix for computer use being slow and hijacking your machine might be a standard rather than a better model.

It closes on agent-to-agent: whether anyone actually wants a marketplace of thousands of agents, or whether the real value is the one agent that has access you'll never get. Plus a well-earned complaint about three-letter acronyms and why researchers are still the only people naming things well.

Timestamps:[0:00] Intro[0:59] Launching the conference in China[1:34] What North America gets wrong about agents[2:23] Super apps versus endless integrations[3:14] What happens when they expand beyond China[3:39] Tencent and A2A in production[4:34] A model-first country[5:56] Chinese coding agents and harnesses[6:59] Tokyo and the conference world tour[7:26] What WebMCP actually is[8:56] Why it has nothing to do with MCP[9:20] Page-level tools and your logged-in session[10:36] Why WebMCP sat unnoticed for months[11:25] Token efficiency and reliability[12:23] The moment computer use got good[13:15] Two real grievances with computer use[14:06] Collaborating instead of surrendering your screen[15:24] A short detour into Tokyo signage[16:15] Why web developers should be excited[17:04] Agents and the loss of first-party data[18:27] Why an agent cannot just buy something[19:23] Inside the agentic commerce working group[20:18] Upsells recommenders and an agent that ignores them[23:27] The commerce protocols to watch[24:19] Why A2A is next[25:31] Publishing your agent as a service[27:13] The case against agent marketplaces[27:55] Why access beats capability[29:31] Google's protocol land grab[30:45] Bring back the cool names[31:39] Amsterdam, San Jose, and what comes next