Nathan sat in the war room at 9 p.m. Three weeks into his “AI-powered feedback loop” at FinFlow, a Series B fintech. He'd spun up an agent to ingest support tickets, survey responses, and Slack threads, then spit out prioritized themes and Jira tickets. Sounded perfect.
Reality? The agent hallucinated customer IDs, couldn't actually update Jira, and kept asking for the same login every run. Nathan had burned 40 hours on brittle scripts. Output doubled. Trust dropped to zero.
Enter the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Launched by Anthropic in late 2024, now the de facto standard — adopted by OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Cursor, and thousands of servers under the Linux Foundation. MCP is USB-C for agents. One standardized port. No more N×M integration hell.