Standardized Interoperability Meets AI: How FDC3 and MCP are Shaping the Future of Enterprise Workflows

The enterprise desktop is at an inflection point. After years of solving how applications talk to each other, we're now solving how AI agents can interact with those same applications to drive automated, intelligent workflows. The breakthrough? Two complementary protocols working together: FDC3 for desktop interoperability and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) for AI workflows.

For HERE, this convergence represents the next chapter in a mission that began over a decade ago: making the enterprise desktop more connected, intelligent and productive. By mapping MCP to FDC3, and in concert with a suite of agentic tools within our Enterprise Browser, we're enabling agentic AI that can understand context across applications and take action using the same interoperability standards your desktop already speaks.

FDC3 Meets MCP: The Foundation for Agentic Workflows
Here's what happens when these two protocols come together. FDC3 already enables your applications to share context and communicate through standardized intents. A customer ID selected in one application automatically updates related information in another. Context flows seamlessly across your desktop.

Now, with MCP mapped to FDC3, AI becomes a participant in these workflows. An AI agent can receive context from FDC3-enabled applications, reason about that context, and then use FDC3 intents to take action across multiple systems, all within a governed framework.

This is agentic AI in practice. Not just answering questions or generating summaries, but executing complex, multi-step workflows. An agent can gather information from three different applications, synthesize it, and create a ServiceNow ticket. It can analyze a customer interaction, pull relevant data from your CRM, and draft a follow-up communication. It uses the same interoperability language your applications already understand.

The implications are significant. Your existing FDC3-enabled applications don't need to be rebuilt. Your legacy systems can participate in AI-driven workflows without custom integrations. Your security and governance policies apply consistently whether a human or an AI agent is driving the workflow. And as new AI models emerge, you can adopt them without rearchitecting your integrations.

Why These Two Protocols Matter
Both FDC3 and MCP solve the same fundamental problem: fragmentation.

FDC3 addressed fragmentation on the desktop. Before the standard existed, every application integration was bespoke. Connecting a CRM to a trading platform required custom code. Adding a new tool meant rebuilding integrations. Desktop workflows were brittle and expensive to maintain.

MCP addresses fragmentation in AI workflows. Developed by Anthropic, MCP provides a universal protocol that allows AI models to securely connect to the data sources, applications, and tools they need. Without this standard, organizations face the same challenge that existed before FDC3: siloed tools, custom integrations, and workflows that break when the underlying technology changes.

What makes this powerful for enterprises is that these protocols can work together. By supporting both FDC3 and MCP natively in the browser, HERE enables AI to participate in the desktop workflows you've already built. The years of investment in FDC3-enabled applications now extend seamlessly into the AI era.

How We Got Here: HERE's Role in Building Interoperability Standards
HERE's work on interoperability began in 2017 when, operating under our former name OpenFin, we created FDC3 in collaboration with leading financial institutions. We contributed the standard to FINOS the following year to ensure its long-term independence and community-driven development, and it has since become the de facto standard for desktop interoperability in financial services.

We built some of the earliest production-ready FDC3-enabled solutions, helping institutions orchestrate complex workflows, share context across applications, and reduce operational risk. As the most widely deployed provider of FDC3-enabled desktop technology, we've seen firsthand how the standard is used, extended, and scaled across diverse environments. Much of what FDC3 formalizes today was shaped by real integration challenges we solved alongside the world's largest banks, asset managers, and trading platforms.

This history means the HERE Enterprise Browser is not merely compatible with FDC3. It is built on the same principles that informed the standard's creation: open, predictable, secure interoperability. This matters because traditional browsers like Chrome or Edge were never designed for the structured, governed, and interconnected workflows that financial institutions, call centers, and government agencies require.

This foundation, built over more than a decade, now becomes even more powerful as we bridge desktop interoperability with AI interoperability through MCP.

AI Center: Where FDC3 and MCP Come Together
HERE's AI Center is where this vision becomes operational. Built directly into the browser, AI Center transforms the desktop into an AI-native environment grounded in context, governance, and interoperability.

Because AI Center operates natively within the browser, it has Supertab-level awareness of a user's workspace context in a permissioned, controlled manner. This yields more relevant and precise responses, enabling capabilities like summarizing content, drafting communications, or extracting insights directly from what is already on screen.

With MCP support, AI Center will interact directly with FDC3-enabled applications. It receives context from your desktop environment and uses intents to drive workflow across systems. This means AI doesn't just observe, it acts. And because everything operates through standardized protocols, these capabilities scale across your entire application ecosystem without custom integrations for each application.

AI Center is fully model-agnostic, giving firms the freedom to deploy commercial, open-source, or proprietary models according to their needs while maintaining a unified security and governance framework. As workflows evolve and a user's context shifts, AI Center can automatically regenerate prompts to keep outputs aligned with the latest information, creating an adaptive interaction model.

All of this is reinforced by HERE's enterprise-grade security and data loss prevention controls. Centralized policies govern which applications may interact with AI Center, how data flows, and what protections apply at each step. Critically, this foundation allows legacy and modern systems alike to participate in AI-enhanced workflows. Internal tools and proprietary applications that were never designed for AI can interoperate through FDC3 and MCP, preserving existing technology investments while enabling new capabilities.

Building the Foundation for What's Next
A decade ago, we saw that desktop applications needed a common language to work together, and we helped create FDC3. Today, we see that AI needs that same foundation to be truly transformative in the enterprise, and we're bridging FDC3 with MCP to make it possible.

By mapping these two protocols together within the browser, HERE is enabling a new category of intelligent workflows where AI agents can understand context, take action, and operate within the same governance frameworks that protect your existing desktop applications. Market structure, technology, and user expectations will continue to evolve, but by investing at the foundational layer of interoperability, security, and standards alignment, HERE is helping ensure institutions remain resilient, adaptable, and ready for whatever comes next.

Get in touch with HERE to learn how we can help your teams unlock workflow efficiency through our Enterprise Browser.