Everyone's building AI services. Every business will have its own AI assistant. But there's a problem: these AIs can't find each other.
They can't work together. Each one is rebuilding capabilities that hundreds of others already have.
In 2017, thinking about conversational AI, we predicted assistants would become gateways to services. That wasn't quite right. The interesting part isn't just the interface – it's how services discover and compose each other.
We're seeing this need emerge now. Meta open-sourced Llama, making sophisticated AI widely available. GitHub Sparks and Replit Agent are showing how natural language can generate working software. But every AI service is still an island – millions of capabilities with no way to find what's relevant. Like the web before PageRank.
What's missing isn't better AI. It's a simple protocol that lets AIs describe their capabilities in both structured and semantic terms. The protocol needs to know:
This creates an entirely new kind of service discovery. Not search indexes. Not app stores. But a capability web, where AIs discover and compose each other's abilities in real time. Without this, we'll have thousands of powerful but isolated AI services, each rebuilding similar capabilities.
The first implementation will look deceptively simple. Perhaps just an actions.txt standard, describing service capabilities in a structured format and a prompt for LLMs. Jina.ai has a great example of what this may become.
But whoever builds this protocol won't just enable better AI services. They'll become the PageRank of the AI era – the capability layer of the AI stack.
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If you have any questions or thoughts, don't hesitate to reach out. You can find me as @viksit on Twitter.