- MCP was introduced to open source in November 2024
- The protocol helps AI agents access the right data and speak to each other
- Adoption is starting to ramp up among major AI players like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google
GOOGLE CLOUD NEXT, LAS VEGAS – You may have heard it talked about at Google Cloud Next. Perhaps you saw it in recent AI-related news reports. But in a sea of acronyms, it’s just another you glossed over without figuring out what the heck MCP (model context protocol) really is. That’s was a mistake. MCP matters a LOT for the future of AI.
“MCP in 2025 is kind of like HTTP in the early 1990s — it has the potential to change how people interact with businesses and services, and create new types of businesses altogether,” Cloudflare VP of Product Rita Kozlov told Fierce.
Introduced to open source by AI trailblazer Anthropic in November 2024, MCP is a standard that allows enterprises and developers to sidestep issues that previously prevented them from accessing data scattered across different repositories. Basically, it removes the headache of having to design and deploy multiple integrations by offering a single way in which to do so across data sources.
“Think of MCP like a USB-C port for AI applications,” the MCP website explains. “Just as USB-C provides a standardized way to connect your devices to various peripherals and accessories, MCP provides a standardized way to connect AI models to different data sources and tools.”
Nifty, right?
MCP as an AI enabler
But more than just being cool, it turns out MCP will actually a key tool in enabling the agentic AI future. Why? As Kozlov put it, MCP will effectively enable “agents to operate more autonomously and complete tasks on behalf of users.”
Agentic AI is all about training and deploying specialized AI that can work through more complex problems. To do that, the AI agents need to be able to access “the right data at the right time” across a variety of back-ends, Amin Vahdat, Google Cloud’s VP and GM for ML, Systems and Cloud, said in response to questions from Fierce.
Back-ends, of course, means databases and data storage systems like AlloyDB, Cloud SQL and Google Cloud Spanner. Beyond that, MCP can also expose data from REST APIs, or “really any service that can expose a programmatic interface,” Ben Flast, Director of Product Management at MongoDB and the company’s resident AI guru, told Fierce.
Flast said the company sees two primary ways in which MCP will play a role in AI’s advancement. First is agent development, where MCP will be used to help access the necessary data to boost code generation and automation. Second, he said MCP can also aid agents and LLMs as they function, providing necessary context for the AI to interact with various systems.
The trick now, Flast added, is figuring out what exactly agents are going to need from application databases – i.e. what kinds of storage or memory functionality they’ll need to meet performance needs.
Connecting AI to AI with MCP
But AI agents won’t just need to be fed a constant diet of data. They’ll also need to socialize.
Flast said MCP can be used to allow agents to talk to one another. And indeed, Kozlov said “we’re actually already starting to see developers build Agents that ‘speak’ MCP to other Agents.”
But Google Cloud just came up with its own standard to make that happen: the Agent2Agent protocol.
“MCP and A2A are complimentary in that MCP allows you to access data in an open standard way, where A2A allows for interoperability between different agents,” Vahdat explained. “So, think of MCP as model-to-data and A2A as agent-to-agent.” Put the two together and you have a very “easy and productive” way to build more powerful agents, he added.
MCP adoption curve
While the protocol is still very new, Kozlov and Flast said MCP has – like everything else AI-related – been rapidly gaining steam.
“Even Anthropic’s largest competitor, Open AI, has decided to add support for it,” Flast said. “Thousands of MCP Servers have already been built and the protocol was only announced in November 2024.”
Just this week, in fact, Cloudflare joined the MCP server game, adding a remote MCP server capability to its Developer Platform.
“We’re doing this to give developers and organizations a head start building for where MCP is headed because we anticipate that this will be a major new mode of interaction, just like how mobile was,” Kozlov concluded.
Keep your eyes peeled. It sounds like much more MCP news is on the horizon.