Google has introduced a new protocol for AI - A2UI. It allows agents to generate rich user interfaces that they can be displayed in different host applications. Now Lit, Angular, and Flutter renderers are supported, others are in the roadmap.
The main idea is that LLMs can generate a UI from a catalog of predefined widgets and send them as a message to the client.
The workflow looks as follows:
🔸 User sends a message to an AI agent
🔸 Agent generates A2UI messages describing the UI (structure + data in JSON lines format)
{"surfaceUpdate":
{"surfaceId": "booking",
"components": [
{"id": "root", "component": {"Column": {"children": {"explicitList": ["header", "guests-field"]}}}},
{"id": "header", "component": {"Text": {"text": {"literalString": "Confirm Reservation"}, "usageHint": "h1"}}},
{"id": "guests-field", "component": {"TextField": {"label": {"literalString": "Guests"}, "text": {"path": "/reservation/guests"}}}}
]}}🔸 Messages stream to the client application
🔸 Client renders it using native components (Angular, Flutter, React, etc.)
🔸 User interacts with the UI, sending actions back to the agent
🔸 Agent responds with updated A2UI messages
According to the article, the main benefits of the protocol are:
🔸 Security: No LLM-generated code, there is only a declaration passed to the client.
🔸 LLM-friendly: Flat structure, easy for LLMs to generate incrementally
🔸 Framework-agnostic: Separation of the UI structure from the UI implementation.
Right now the project is in early public preview. It looks promising, especially once REST protocol will be supported (now only A2A and AG-UI are supported).
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