ARD joins MCP and A2A in a crowded open-agent-protocol field

There are now at least nine open protocols for connecting AI agents to tools and services. The Stack catalogs MCP from Anthropic, A2A from Google, Agentic Resource Discovery from Microsoft, Google and Hugging Face, ACP from IBM, Agent Client Protocol for connecting coding agents to IDEs, Agentic Commerce Protocol from OpenAI and Stripe, AGNTCY (originally Cisco, now a Linux Foundation project), Agent Network Protocol, and AGTP, which proposes moving agent traffic off HTTP entirely.

The newest, Agentic Resource Discovery, launched this summer with contributions from Cisco, Databricks, GitHub, GoDaddy, Nvidia, Salesforce, ServiceNow and Snowflake alongside the three authoring companies.

"It's early, so there's a land grab of different organisations trying to put their stake in the ground with some protocol," Forrester principal analyst David Mooter tells reporter Mary Branscombe. "They're all tackling the problems [in] different ways."

The point the article builds on is simpler than the acronym pile suggests. Controlling how services can be found, Branscombe writes, also influences which services are findable easily, or possibly at all. Whoever defines the discovery layer defines what sits in the agent's catalog. The piece gestures at the XKCD comic on standards proliferation for the usual reason.

Two of the architects we follow in our Who's Who flagged the piece this week. The audience here is people deciding which specs to commit code to, not procurement teams.