Tech Giants Back New 'ARD' Protocol Enabling AI Agents to Independently Discover and Use Tools
Summary
Tech giants including Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Nvidia, and Salesforce are backing a groundbreaking new protocol called Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD), enabling AI agents to independently discover and safely use tools across corporate systems through a two-level framework of Catalogs and Registries, with the specification now publicly available for organizations to adopt.
Key Points
- A new protocol called Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD), backed by Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Nvidia, Salesforce and others, is being introduced to help AI agents independently discover and safely use the tools they need to complete assigned tasks.
- ARD operates across two levels — Catalogs, where organizations publish their available capabilities, and Registries, which act as search engines that crawl those published catalogs — creating a standardized common layer across different systems and silos within a corporate domain.
- The ARD specification is now publicly available, and organizations are being invited to publish their own catalogs using a quickstart guide and join the community to help shape the future evolution of the protocol.