Snowflake Adds Support for Agentic Resource Discovery Specification

Snowflake now supports the ARD Specification, an open protocol designed to standardize how AI agents and tools are cataloged, searched, and discovered within an enterprise. This aims to make AI capabilities easily discoverable across various interfaces, enabling seamless invocation of agents, APIs, and workflows.

The ARD specification defines a four-step process: Describe (publisher creates a manifest), Curate (discovery service builds collection), Search (clients query with natural language), and Execute (client connects directly to the resource). Discovery services can also compose federated networks to merge internal, vendor, and public resources.

ARD provides a discovery layer that allows AI clients to automatically find the best capability for a given task across an organization's built and approved resources. Clients can describe a task in natural language, and ARD returns matching agents with details on what they do, who provides them, and how to access them, ranked by relevance.

Teams building agents in Snowsight, Snowflake CoCo, or via the Cortex Agents SDK can have their agents automatically registered in the organization’s discovery endpoint upon publishing. This makes Cortex Agents discoverable across the enterprise without additional steps for the builder.

Publishing an agent to an organization’s ARD discovery endpoint makes it accessible to any ARD-compatible AI interface, including Snowflake CoWork, Claude, Copilot, or custom applications, without requiring re-registration for each client. This simplifies agent management and availability.

Snowflake's adoption of ARD aligns with its dedication to open standards like MCP and Apache Iceberg, enabling customers to connect a broad range of AI interfaces while maintaining governance, permissions, and data security within the Snowflake environment.