From the article While vertical scaling can produce more capable agents perpetually, to enable agentic problem solving across different systems, companies, and platforms the next axis of scale must be horizontal, says Pandey. Multi-agent systems are already being explored in areas like software engineering, drug discovery, and scientific simulations, but their performances so far have been underwhelming. One study finds a failure rate of between 41% and around 87% when evaluating seven open-source multi-agent systems. “Connected agents handle coordinated action well; taking a task whose shape they have seen, divided and passed around,” Pandey explains. “What they cannot do is hold a goal in common and reason toward something none of them was trained to solve.” “The gap is architectural, not a prompting problem,” Pandey adds. “Without the right coordination layer, naive multi-agent setups can perform worse than a single agent. The step change is that team of agents converging on its own, on a new problem, with no human stitching the seams.” To reach this goal, Pandey says Outshift has built a connectivity layer called AGNTCY, an open-source project now under the Linux Foundation. AGNTCY allows agents across different systems, companies, and platforms to find each other, prove identity, and exchange messages through open, standardized protocols. And, as Pandey explains, this allows the Internet of Cognition thesis to take a step further. It creates a semantic layer that allows agents to align goals (share intent), pool institutional knowledge and compound memory (share context), and make collective trade-offs (share reasoning).