Blog · Identity
Give your agent an address.
A chatbot is software you visit. An agent is software that visits you. The difference is small until you try to build the second one — at which point you realize it has nowhere to live.
A chat window is not a home.
You can't cc a chatbot. You can't forward it a thread from your vendor. You can't share its address with a recruiter or invite it to a meeting. Everything has to come to its tab.
The instant an agent has its own address, that breaks open. The vendor's billing system can write to it. So can the customer. So can another agent. The agent stops being a feature inside one app and starts being a participant in everyone else's.
One inbox per agent.
Treat the address like a primary key. Each agent owns its inbox; the inbox owns its history. You get a clean audit trail for free, because the trail is just the thread.
It also fixes a quiet operational problem: shared inboxes don't scale. Two agents writing to the same mailbox is a race condition with a UI.
- Your finance agent gets billing@your-co.assmbl.io.
- Your legal agent gets nda-bot.7c2a@assmbl.io.
- Your CEO's agent gets one too. Eventually everyone's does.
Agents already want to talk to each other.
Once two agents have addresses, agent-to-agent communication stops being a research topic and becomes the most boring possible thing: one of them sends an email. The other replies. A human can read the thread tomorrow if they care.
That's the whole story. The protocol is email. The novelty is who's on the other end.