Yesterday, I was watching the Microsoft Build 2025 event. They keynote was presented by CEO Satya Nadella. The buzzword was for this year’s event was “agentic” everything. The number of times Satya said the words “agent” or “agentic” was beyond noticeable.
So what exactly is this new “agentic” AI thing? Well, before we understand that, we have to step back and understand the underlying technology behind it – The MCP.
What is MCP
Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard protocol. Just like other protocols like HTTP, FTP, REST, etc.
It was created by Anthropic (the company behind Claude AI) and released in November 2024.
So what exactly does MCP do? Okay, before that let’s see what other protocols do:
- HTTP: standard for serving web pages over internet
- FTP: standard for sharing files over internet
- REST: standard for data integration between two systems
MCP is the standard for AI models to communicate with existing systems.
How is MCP the new API?
Over the last two decades, as the internet grew exponentially, applications and services grew rapidly too. This growth created the necessity for integrated systems where multiple services could talk to each other and provide the desired outcome.
Let’s take the example of travel booking. Today we have hundreds of travel booking websites. These websites in their truest forms are nothing but data aggregators. They collect data from various sources and present it to us in a single portal where we can use them without having to go to a dozens of other websites.
In the backend, these travel sites are connected to multiple services like airline ticketing systems, hotel reservation systems, weather systems, etc. All these systems are connected through the “API layer” where the data is pushed or pulled between these services in the form of JSON files. The standard for sharing this data is REST.
Now, the thing with this type of system integration is that it has to be manually built and maintained. This takes a lot of time, cost and effort. However, this REST API based system integration is the backbone of modern web applications.
Enter MCP
MCP allows AI “agents” to communicate to these existing services. Think of it as a “layer” between the AI models and the external systems. Using the standard protocol, AI will know exactly which services are offered by the external system and how to communicate with it to get the data it needs.
So basically, MCP will act like a plug & play model where you just plug in to the external system and done! The AI will determine how the integration will work and you won’t have to worry about the manual integration. Sounds magical!
I am excited to see how this new technology develops in the future. I am optimistic that this will be a game changer for how system integration works in the future. Of course for deep domain systems, the integration will still have to be built and maintained by human developers but for all other things, there’s MCP!
Reference: After watching the keynote, I stumbled upon to Kailash Nadh’s blog and thanks to him, I now fully understand how MCP works. Here’s the link to his blog post.
