ARD reference
Agentic Resource Discovery Reference
Agentic Resource Discovery is the discovery layer that helps AI clients find and verify agentic resources before MCP, APIs, workflows, or agents execute them.
What is Agentic Resource Discovery?
Agentic Resource Discovery is an open discovery protocol for agentic resources. It helps an AI client ask which capability is available for a task and receive matching resources with metadata needed to decide what to use.
ARD sits before invocation. It does not execute tools by itself; the selected resource is invoked through its native mechanism such as MCP, an API, a workflow engine, a skill, or another agent framework.
Catalogs and registries
ARD uses catalog-style descriptions for resources such as MCP servers, APIs, workflows, skills, agents, datasets, or nested catalogs. A public or internal `ai-catalog.json` can describe what each resource does, who provides it, where it lives, and how a client can reach it.
Registries act as search services over those catalogs. In an enterprise, this can become a governed internal index of approved AI-callable capabilities rather than a broad crawl of the open web.
Trust and verification
Production ARD work should include publisher identity, domain ownership, trust metadata, attestations, compliance notes, egress policy, and pinned resource versions where the risk requires it.
The value is not only that an agent can find a resource. The value is that operators can understand why a resource was selected, who owns it, whether it is approved, and which execution boundary applies after discovery.
Enterprise use cases
ARD is useful when teams need AI clients to discover approved internal APIs, documents, workflows, dashboards, datasets, queues, tools, or vendor capabilities without stuffing every schema into the model context window.
A strong ARD layer helps teams publish, govern, search, and operationalize AI-callable resources while leaving actual execution to MCP, APIs, workflow systems, or human-in-loop processes.
Sources and review status
Reviewed by PITECH engineering. Last reviewed: 2026-07-05. PITECH IT SOLUTIONS is a UAE-based enterprise AI product engineering company operating under License No. 999566. Start the conversation on WhatsApp: +971 55 572 6745.