The vocabulary that runs through every question

Four words carry most of the weight in this exam, and questions are frequently
decided by whether you have them straight rather than by anything technical.

Grounding

Giving the model your facts at the moment it answers. Not training, not
memory — retrieval.

The practical consequence is worth holding on to: "it doesn't know our products"
is a grounding problem, never a fine-tuning one. People reach for fine-tuning
when the honest answer is that the model was never shown the information.

Tools and actions

How an agent does something rather than merely says something. Connectors,
flows, APIs, MCP servers.

And the line that connects this card to the security material: every tool you add
widens what a manipulated agent could do. Capability and blast radius are the
same measurement.

Orchestration

How the agent decides what to do next.

Classic is where you drew the paths yourself. Generative is where it
reasons over topics, actions and knowledge to work out its own route.

The two open protocols, and which problem each solves

MCP — Model Context Protocol. A standard way to expose tools and data to an
agent. Agent to capability. One server can be reused across many agents. It is
also a live egress path, which is why it reappears in the security material.

A2A — Agent2Agent. A standard way for agents to talk to each other, agent
to agent, including across vendors. It is the interoperability answer in
multi-agent scenarios.

Exam trap. MCP and A2A are not alternatives, and the exam will offer them as
if they were. MCP connects an agent to a capability; A2A connects an agent to
another agent. Match the protocol to which side of that boundary the problem
sits on.

Words that decide answers

Some words in a question stem are effectively instructions. Spot them and the
option list narrows immediately.

Deterministic points to a flow, a topic or a query.
Consequential means a human stays accountable.
Exact or complete means a query, not generation.
Cross-vendor agents means A2A.
Reusable capability means MCP.

The one line to carry: grounding is retrieval, tools are action, orchestration
is decision — and MCP faces capabilities while A2A faces other agents.

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Currency (19 Aug 2026). A2A went generally available in April 2026 — connecting
agents to other agents across vendors is now a production capability, not a preview
one. See card 44.