MCP

MCP, short for Model Context Protocol, is a standard way to plug an AI into your tools and data. Before it, every AI app had to build a custom connector for every service, so wiring five apps to five tools meant twenty-five separate integrations. MCP replaces that with one shared protocol: a tool exposes an "MCP server," and any AI that speaks MCP can use it. People call it a USB-C port for AI, and that's close enough.

Anthropic introduced it in late 2024 and it caught on fast. There are MCP servers for Slack, GitHub, Google Drive, Postgres, Stripe, and hundreds more, so an agent can read a Slack channel or query your database without anyone hand-building that link. When you hear that a tool "has an MCP," it means you can wire it into Claude, Cursor, or whatever agent you use and let the AI work with it directly.

It comes up the moment you want an AI to do something with your actual stuff, not just talk about it. If you're picking tools, "does it have an MCP server" is a fast way to tell whether it'll plug into your agent without custom engineering. If you're more hands-on, setting up an MCP connection is often the difference between an AI that can describe your data and one that can go get it.

You don't need to understand the protocol's internals to benefit. Mostly it's enough to know that MCP is the standard plug, and more of your tools are shipping servers for it every week.