Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD): cos'è, chi lo ha annunciato e perché Snowflake ci punta forte

What is the Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) Specification?

ARD is an open specification, announced on June 17, 2026, for publishing, discovering, and verifying AI agent capabilities across the web . It defines a machine-readable /.well-known/ai-catalog.json file that sites can host to list available agents, MCP servers, skills, and APIs, allowing registries to index them and AI clients to find them dynamically . ARD sits entirely before invocation — it helps a client find the right resource, but the resource is then invoked through its own native protocol (e.g., MCP, function calling) . The specification is being developed under a Linux Foundation working group and is not a product or marketplace — it is a shared protocol layer .

Companies Backing ARD

The specification lists the following companies as collaborators on the announcement :

• Microsoft (co-developer)
• Google (co-developer)
• GoDaddy (co-developer)
• Cisco
• Databricks
• GitHub
• Hugging Face
• NVIDIA
• Salesforce
• ServiceNow
• Snowflake

Satya Nadella made the decision for Microsoft to participate, Alan Eustace for Google, and co-developers also include Yahoo .

Snowflake's Support and Broader Agentic Enterprise Strategy

Snowflake announced its support for ARD on June 17, 2026, describing it as "an open protocol that standardizes how AI agents and tools are cataloged, searched and discovered across an enterprise" . This builds on Snowflake's broader strategic pivot to become the control plane for the agentic enterprise, articulated throughout 2026 .

Key elements of that strategy include:

• Snowflake Intelligence — a system for AI-powered data discovery, governance, and decision-making .
• Cortex Agents (now GA) — enabling developers to build data agents that plan tasks, use tools, and generate responses from structured and unstructured data .
• Managed MCP Server (now GA) — Snowflake's hosted Model Context Protocol server for connecting agents to tools .
• Snowflake CoCo — a cross-platform coding agent announced at Summit 2026 .
• Snowflake Datastream — a native streaming service bridging real-time data delivery and autonomous code generation .

ARD support fits specifically as the discovery layer for that agent ecosystem — it lets Snowflake's agents find third-party tools and lets third-party agents find Snowflake-hosted resources, moving Snowflake from being merely a data warehouse toward an open, interoperable agent platform .

Related Vendor Developments

• GitHub Copilot Agent Finder — Launched alongside ARD, implementing the spec to let Copilot discover and invoke external agents and tools dynamically .
• Microsoft's ARD investment — Microsoft is developing ARD as part of a secure common layer for publishing and indexing AI capabilities across its ecosystem .
• Cisco/AGNTCY — Cisco's Outshift division launched the AGNTCY open-source project in March 2025 for agent interoperability, which predates ARD and shares overlapping goals of an "Internet of Agents" .
• GoDaddy — Emphasized the identity-and-discovery combination in ARD, arguing that trusted discovery requires verified publisher identity .
• Hugging Face — Positioning ARD as a foundational layer for an open agent ecosystem, with broad community participation .