Part 4 of our Buzzword Breakdown Series
AI systems can sound brilliant. But ask them to do something like book a meeting, retrieve a policy doc, pull real-time numbers, and they often fall short.
Why? Because AI doesn’t “live” inside your systems.
It sits outside, guessing what’s going on inside. Until now.
🧩 Enter MCP: Model Context Protocol
Introduced by Anthropic in late 2024, MCP is an open standard for letting LLMs speak to external tools, systems, and data sources: reliably, securely, and in a structured way.
It’s not a product or a plugin.
It’s the missing layer between language models and the real world of apps, APIs, and live data.
💡 Why does it matter?
Without something like MCP, every integration is bespoke.
Developers have to invent new ways for each model to access each tool.
MCP changes that: now adding functionality to an LLM is now as easy as installing an app on your phone.
It provides a consistent interface, so AI can:
🔍 Query a live database
📄 Fetch documents from a CMS
⚙️Trigger workflows in SaaS tools
🔁 Read from or write to your internal systems
🚦 Understand what’s available and what’s off-limits
In plain English:
MCP is like a menu + toolkit for AI.
It tells the model:
➡️ “Here’s what you can see.”
➡️ “Here’s how to interact with it.”
➡️ “Here’s what good behaviour looks like.”
That means more capable agents, faster development, and fewer hallucinations, because the model stops guessing and starts accessing.
What could this look like in practice?
✅ “Find all customers with overdue invoices.”
→ The AI queries your finance system directly, securely, and with full audit trails.
✅ “Generate an end-of-month report using the latest sales data.”
→ It pulls numbers from your dashboard and formats the report in your preferred style.
✅ “Update the onboarding doc with the new holiday policy.”
→ The AI retrieves the relevant doc from Confluence, edits it, and flags it for review.
What we think:
At Methodix, we love standards that simplify complexity.
MCP is one of the most promising ways to bridge the gap between AI potential and business reality.
It’s early days, but if you want LLMs that don’t just talk, but truly integrate, MCP is a big part of the picture.