MCP Goes Mainstream: Why a Boring Protocol Matters

Microsoft Build put weight behind Model Context Protocol, and the significance is the same as any successful protocol: it stops every integration from being bespoke.

The problem it solves

Before a standard, connecting an assistant to your systems meant writing an adapter per assistant per system. That is a combinatorial mess that nobody maintains. A shared protocol turns it into one server per system, consumable by anything that speaks it.

What to do with that

If you run internal systems that an assistant should reach — a ticketing system, a data warehouse, a scheduling tool — exposing them over a standard interface is now infrastructure work with a predictable payoff rather than a speculative integration.

The caution is the obvious one: an interface that lets an agent act on your systems needs the same authorization model as any other API, and it needs it before the first useful demo, not after.