Traditional technology leaders are collaborating to establish a new technical barrier, aiming to counter the expansion of AI startups in the corporate market.
According to a report from The Information on June 18, companies including Alphabet (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Salesforce.com (CRM), Snowflake (SNOW), and ServiceNow have jointly announced support for a new software standard named Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD).
This protocol is designed to allow enterprise employees to access all of a company's AI tools and capabilities through a single application, thereby positioning the supporting companies' products as the unified gateway for corporate AI usage. Notably, Anthropic and OpenAI are absent from the initial list of supporters.
The introduction of the ARD protocol intensifies the battle for ecosystem dominance between established tech giants and emerging AI forces.
Examining the ARD Protocol
The core objective of the ARD protocol is to advance the transformation of products from traditional enterprise software vendors like Microsoft and Alphabet into gateway platforms for accessing diverse AI capabilities.
Under this protocol, when an employee initiates an AI task through an application like GitHub Copilot, Google Gemini, or Salesforce.com CRM, the system can automatically identify and invoke all AI functions and services supporting ARD, eliminating the need for users to manually switch between tools.
Microsoft stated in a blog post that "ARD helps AI clients discover various capabilities but does not replace authentication, authorization, governance, or organizational trust decisions."
Technologically, ARD builds upon the Model Context Protocol (MCP) released by Anthropic last year. MCP also aimed to enable AI agents to access external application data, functioning similarly to an API. Microsoft, OpenAI, and Alphabet had previously supported MCP. The proposal of ARD is seen as a further extension and evolution of the MCP concept within the context of deepening enterprise AI adoption.
The Battle for the Gateway
The stance of Anthropic and OpenAI towards this new standard is telling, as neither company has joined the initial ARD support coalition. Analysis suggests that, as challengers in the enterprise application market, they may be choosing to actively disregard the protocol.
The fundamental reason lies in a strategic conflict: Anthropic and OpenAI aim to position Claude and ChatGPT as the primary gateway for employees to access all AI tools and enterprise applications, rather than merely being a component within another company's ecosystem. This directly opposes the logic of Alphabet and Microsoft in using ARD to build a self-centric ecosystem.
Currently, both traditional software vendors and new AI firms are racing to develop so-called "superagents"—universal AI systems capable of operating across applications. Whether ARD will achieve widespread adoption remains highly uncertain.
Comments