I contributed technical content and and opinions to an article titled “What Is Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Why Should You Care?” in the January 2026 edition of the Pure AI web site. See https://pureai.com/articles/2026/01/07/what-is-model-context-protocol-mcp-and-why-should-you-care.aspx.

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open-source standard that defines a set of rules for how AI assistants and agents can connect to data sources and tools. The idea is illustrated in the diagram below:

In the diagram, AI Application 1 could be something like a ChatGPT (from Open AI) system. The application needs data from a SQL database, a document store, and some sort of custom processing tool. AI application 2 could be something like a Llama agent (from Meta) that needs to access some documents and a database of images.

The two applications could use custom code to access the needed resources. Instead, the applications access their resources through a set of standardized rules defined by the Model Context Protocol.

MCP defines how AI applications can access resources, but MCP is not a protocol for how different AI applications can communicate with each other (indicated by the dashed red arrow in the diagram). Designing an application-to-application protocol is a seperate ongoing effort in AI research.

I provided some comments.

McCaffrey observed, “One business possibility is a company that creates a platform that offers a curated library of pre-built, enterprise-grade MCP servers for popular business tools (Salesforce, SAP, Smartsheet, etc.) This could appeal to companies that can’t afford deep in-house AI technical expertise.”

McCaffrey speculated, “It’s possible that MCP will evolve into a marketplace ecosystem where pre-built, certified MCP servers for popular enterprise tools become commoditized plug-and-play solutions.”

Many years ago, when my son was just a few years old, he had an interesting set of tracks in the shape of letters of the alphabet. The tracks were cleverly designed with a connection protocol so they could be hooked together in all kinds of interesting ways. My son and I spent many hours playing with this toy.