Calling a Rovo Agent from an External Custom Agent

[Giuseppe Torraco]

Is it possible to invoke or orchestrate a Rovo agent from an external agent developed in VS Code?
Specifically, I’d like to understand whether there is a supported way to enable communication between a custom, locally developed agent and an existing Rovo agent—such as through APIs, webhooks, or other endpoints exposed by the platform.

What is the recommended approach or the reference documentation to enable this type of integration?

[Anthony Morais · Accepted solution]

Hi @Giuseppe Torraco 

No, at the moment there isn’t a supported way to call or orchestrate a Rovo Agent from something running outside the Atlassian platform (like a custom agent in VS Code, a CLI tool, or any standalone app).

Right now, Rovo Agents live entirely inside the Atlassian ecosystem, and they don’t expose APIs, webhooks, or any external endpoints that an outside agent could use to “trigger” or hand off work to them. So in practice:

You can build your own external agent.
You can integrate that external agent with Jira/Confluence via Atlassian’s public APIs.

But you cannot trigger a Rovo Agent or pass instructions to it programmatically from outside Atlassian.
You can integrate it with Jira or Confluence using the regular public APIs.

But you can’t programmatically invoke a Rovo Agent from outside Atlassian.

At the moment, all the orchestration for Rovo Agents happens internally, and they behave like native smart assistants within the platform.

If Atlassian eventually opens up a way to chain or call Rovo Agents from external systems whether via API, events, or some integration layer—it will show up in the developer docs first. But as of today, that capability doesn’t exist.

I hope this simple contribution helps!

[Giuseppe Torraco]

I saw that the Rovo MCP Server is now available in beta.

I would like to know if it can be used to orchestrate extarnal agents or programs together with Rovo agents.

Has anyone tried it and can share their experience?

[Dr Valeri Colon _Connect Centric_]

@Giuseppe Torraco Good question. Even with the MCP server, you still can’t orchestrate or invoke a Rovo agent from an external agent. MCP exposes tools (APIs like Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket) to external clients, not Rovo agents themselves. Rovo agents can consume MCP tools, but MCP clients can’t call back into Rovo or hand work off to an agent. So MCP helps external agents talk to Atlassian data—not coordinate with Rovo agents.

[Raghavendran_Narayanan]

There is always a time tested proven way to integrate 2 agents.

Agent 1 : (External Agent) - Lets Say it create a story . Let the story be created in Jira and add a comment in Jira item : "AI_Created_Story : Ready for Refinement"

Jira Automation : Check the exact starting string : "AI_Created_Story" in the comment and invoke Agent 2 , with the exact comment from Jira and refine the story further.

Agent 2 : Now the Rovo agent 2 is Orchestrated with External Agent 1 . :)

It may not be a smartest solution, but we have a way!

[Dinesh M]

It seems like Rovo agents can be invoked from the Jira Automations which can have webhooks as a trigger. So you can call the webhook to trigger the automation in which you call the Rovo agents

[Mike Burns]

Atlassian have said that they will implement the A2A protocol, but it seems that they are only implementing half of it - the downstream/remote agent part, e.g. they will allow a Rovo client agent to call into a remote agent but not have client agents call into it. 

This is a bit disappointing. 

MCP is great but it means that I have to create an agent to use the Atlassian tools rather than use the Atlassian agents to do the job - jobs that they are much better suited for and a source of pride for Atlassian. 

Brendan Haire VP, Engineering of AI Platform. Atlassian - can you confirm / make this happen for us :) 

[Birendra Pratap Singh]

From the Atlassian Community discussion you’re viewing, here’s the current state of play regarding invoking or orchestrating a Rovo Agent from an external agent (like one you develop in VS Code):

🚫 Current Limitations
- No direct orchestration: At present, Rovo Agents live entirely inside the Atlassian ecosystem. They don’t expose APIs, webhooks, or external endpoints that allow you to trigger or pass instructions to them from outside tools.
- MCP Server: Even with the new MCP (Model Context Protocol) server, the integration is one-way. MCP lets external clients access Atlassian tools (Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket), but it does not allow external agents to call into Rovo Agents themselves. Rovo can consume MCP tools, but MCP clients cannot orchestrate Rovo.
- A2A protocol: Atlassian has mentioned implementing parts of the Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol, but so far only the downstream/remote agent side is supported. That means Rovo can call out, but external agents cannot call in.

⚙️ Workarounds
- Jira Automation + Webhooks: You can set up Jira Automation rules that trigger Rovo Agents indirectly. For example:
- External agent creates a Jira issue or comment with a special marker (e.g., AICreatedStory: Ready for Refinement).
- Jira Automation detects that marker and invokes a Rovo Agent to refine or process the item.
- Indirect chaining: This isn’t a native API call, but it’s a way to “hand off” work between your external agent and Rovo using Jira as the bridge.

📚 Reference Documentation
- Atlassian’s developer documentation for Rovo and MCP is the place to watch for updates. If Atlassian opens up external orchestration (via APIs, events, or integration layers), it will appear there first.
- For now, the recommended approach is to integrate your external agent directly with Jira/Confluence APIs and use automation rules if you want Rovo to be part of the workflow.

---

👉 In short: you can’t directly invoke Rovo Agents from VS Code or any external agent today. The supported path is to integrate with Atlassian APIs and use Jira Automation as a bridge if you want Rovo involved.

Would you like me to sketch out a step-by-step example workflow showing how an external agent (in VS Code) could trigger Rovo indirectly via Jira Automation + webhooks? That way you’d have a concrete integration pattern to experiment with.

[Mike Burns]

Thanks @Birendra Pratap Singh  - the problem will be context. For example, if the external AI agent is the front end for chat to a human, and we send the context / chat history to Rovo with a jira automation webhook, Rovo may require more information, and send the requests back to the external ai (again via a webhook), however the additional data would then require the context/full chat again. This then grows exponentially as the chat back to the human continues. 

The only "work around" for this is to implement all the knowledge about requests and the "insides" of jira within the external AI agent - making rovo unnecessary. But this ultimately means that we have implemented Rovo outside of atlassian - why would we want to do that, it's already there and great. 

This is why the A2A protocol exists.