Your customers still click. Increasingly, the agents working on their behalf want to call your system directly instead. The Model Context Protocol is the interface that connection has standardised on, and wrapping a system you already run is a contained piece of engineering — not a rebuild.
A human reads a screen and infers what to do. An agent cannot. It needs an explicit contract: here are the actions available, here is what each one expects, here is what it returns.
Once one product in a category can be driven by an agent, the evaluation question changes from which has better features to which one my tools can actually operate.
Someone reads a value off one internal system and types it into another. That is a person doing an API's job, all day, with a typo rate.
You may already have a perfectly good REST API. An agent still needs to discover what exists, understand when each call is appropriate, and be constrained to what this particular user may touch.
A single-tenant proof of concept takes days. Multi-tenant isolation, authentication, audit and predictable failure behaviour are where the actual work lives.
Built on the official SDKs, wired to the system you already run, and deployed on infrastructure you control.
Most engagements start as a proof of concept on one system, precisely so both sides can see whether the agent behaviour is good enough before committing to production scope.
Which actions agents should be able to take, against which systems, and where the permission boundary has to sit.
The tool list, the description text and the input and output schemas, agreed in writing before implementation starts.
Implementation against your API, then authentication and tenant scoping — which is most of the distance between a demo and production.
Behaviour tuned against real clients until tool selection is stable, then deployed with documentation. Maintenance is optional and separately priced.
The Model Context Protocol is an open standard for exposing a system's capabilities to AI agents. Instead of every product inventing its own way to be driven by an agent, and every agent client writing bespoke code for every product, both sides implement one protocol. Your system publishes a set of tools; any compliant client can discover them, understand what each does, and call them.
No. An MCP server sits in front of what you already have. It is a translation and permission layer, not a replacement. If your existing API can do the thing, the work is exposing it correctly rather than building it again.
An OpenAPI document describes endpoints for a developer who will read it once and write code. MCP describes capabilities for an agent that must decide, at run time and without a human, which capability is appropriate right now. The practical difference shows up in the description text: an endpoint summary written for a developer is usually too terse for an agent to choose correctly from.
Any client that implements the protocol. In practice that includes the major agent and coding clients in current use, and the list keeps growing — which is the point of implementing a standard rather than a bespoke integration per vendor.
The server authenticates the caller and resolves every request against that identity's existing permissions in your product, rather than trusting anything the agent asserts about who it is acting for. Tenant scoping is applied at the data access layer, not merely checked in the tool description — a description is guidance to a language model, never a security control.
On your infrastructure. Requests go from the agent client to your server and to your API. We do not insert a hosted middleman, and there is no arrangement under which your customers' data passes through us in normal operation.
It will need occasional attention, which is why maintenance is offered as a separate, optional item rather than pretended away. Building on the official SDKs absorbs most protocol churn; the changes that actually reach you tend to come from your own API evolving, not from the protocol.
That is the recommended way in. One system, a handful of tools, real client testing — enough to see whether agents behave usefully against your domain before anyone commits to multi-tenant production scope. If the answer turns out to be no, that is a cheap thing to have learned.
Two or three concrete actions and the system they run against is enough to scope a proof of concept. We reply to every serious enquiry within two working days.