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For a while, using AI in your business meant copy and paste.
You asked a chatbot for an email, copied it into your CRM, pasted the numbers from your ad account back into the chat, and moved the output into your course platform by hand. The AI was smart. It just could not touch anything. You were the cable between every tool.
That is the problem the Model Context Protocol solves. And it is the reason AI agents can now do real work inside a business instead of just talking about it.
What is MCP, in plain English?
MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. It is a shared language that lets an AI model plug into a tool and use it.
The USB-C comparison
The official documentation puts it this way: "Think of MCP like a USB-C port for AI applications."2 Before USB-C, every device had its own cable. Before MCP, every AI tool needed its own custom connection to every app. Now one standard covers both sides.
When Anthropic introduced MCP in November 2024, it described it as an open standard for building secure, two-way connections between data sources and AI-powered tools.1 Two-way matters. The AI can read from the tool and act on it.
What that looks like in a business
A connected agent can pull a contact from your CRM, read the last three messages, draft a reply in your voice, and log the conversation, without you being the cable. The AI stops being a chat window and starts being an operator.
Servers and clients, without the jargon
You will hear two words when people talk about MCP. A server is the connector on the tool's side: the piece that exposes your CRM, your files or your calendar in a way AI can use. A client is the AI application on the other side, the assistant or agent that plugs in. You do not need to build either to benefit. Most business owners will simply turn on connectors that someone else already built, then decide what each one is allowed to do.
- AI applicationThe client: an assistant or agent
- MCPThe shared standard in the middle
- ConnectorThe server on the tool's side
- Your toolCRM, files, calendar, payments
Who controls MCP now?
This is the part that convinced me MCP is not a passing trend.
On December 9, 2025, Anthropic donated MCP to the Agentic AI Foundation, a directed fund under the Linux Foundation co-founded by Anthropic, Block and OpenAI.3 The Linux Foundation listed Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Block, Bloomberg, Cloudflare, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI as founding platinum members.4
MCP is the universal standard protocol for connecting AI models to tools, data and applications.
Why neutral ownership matters
When one company owns a standard, competitors hesitate to build on it. When it sits in a neutral foundation, everyone can. The MCP project says the Linux Foundation "will not dictate the technical direction of MCP," and the existing maintainers keep making decisions with community input.5 By August 2026, the foundation reported 247 member organizations worldwide.6
97M+
Which AI tools support MCP?
According to Anthropic, MCP is supported in ChatGPT, Cursor, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Visual Studio Code, among other popular AI products.3 The official docs also list Claude and ChatGPT among the AI assistants that support it.2
For you, that means something simple. Build a connection once, use it with more than one AI. You are not betting your business on a single vendor's plugin store.
That matters more than it sounds. AI models change fast. The best model for writing this quarter may not be the best one next quarter. When your tools speak a shared standard, you can switch the brain without rewiring the whole business.
Why should a coach or consultant care about MCP?
Because your business runs on a stack of tools, and the expensive work happens in the gaps between them.
Your stack, connected
Think about what an expert business runs on: a course platform, a CRM, a checkout, an email tool, an ad account, a website builder, maybe an automation tool like n8n or Zapier. Every one of those is a place where an AI agent could do useful work, if it could reach it.
I build on Kajabi, GoHighLevel, Framer, Stripe, Commas, Zapier, n8n and Meta. The day Framer connected to Claude, I let my last website builder go. Connections like that are exactly what MCP standardizes. I covered the idea in Claude Integrations.
| Copy and paste AI | Connected AI |
|---|---|
| You move text between tools by hand | The agent reads and writes inside the tools |
| Every output needs you as the cable | You review and approve the output |
| AI knows only what you paste in | AI works from your real data and context |
| One tool at a time | One brief across the whole stack |
Where it shows up in my work
My AI agents build pages, checkout, email, tracking, Meta ads and the CRM around an offer in one working session, then three days of testing, and the client is live inside a week. That is how I build for clients. None of that is possible when AI is trapped in a chat window.
What can go wrong with MCP?
Plenty, if you are careless. An agent that can act inside your tools can also make mistakes inside your tools.
The official MCP docs publish security best practices for exactly this reason.2 Treat an MCP connection the way you would treat giving a new contractor a login. Useful, and worth thinking about first. The spending and approval rules are in Agents That Spend Money.
And remember that client data carries obligations. If you work in a regulated space, like health, finance or legal, check what your agreements and the law allow before any client information flows through an AI connection (see Feeding Customer Data to AI).
How should a business owner start with MCP?
- List the five tools your business cannot run without. CRM, course platform, payments, email, ads.
- Check which of them already offer an MCP connection or a connector in the AI tool you use.
- Pick one low risk, high repetition task, like summarizing new leads or drafting follow up replies for review.
- Connect that one tool with read access first. Watch what the agent does for a week.
- Add write access only with an approval step, and only for the task you tested.
- Document what each connection is allowed to do, so the system does not live only in your head.
If you would rather not wire this yourself, I build the whole revenue system around an offer with my agents. And if you run a team that delivers for clients, the same system and agents can be installed in your business, with your operators trained to run it.
MCP is plumbing (with Agent2Agent as its sibling). Nobody gets excited about plumbing. But the businesses that get their plumbing right in the next two years are going to run with a fraction of the people and a fraction of the friction. That is the whole game.
Keep building.Ekai
Questions people ask
What is the Model Context Protocol in simple terms?
MCP is an open standard for connecting AI applications to outside systems like files, databases, apps and tools. The official docs compare it to a USB-C port for AI applications.
Who owns MCP now?
Anthropic introduced MCP in November 2024 and donated it in December 2025 to the Agentic AI Foundation, a directed fund under the Linux Foundation co-founded by Anthropic, Block and OpenAI.
Which AI tools support MCP?
According to Anthropic, MCP is supported in ChatGPT, Cursor, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Visual Studio Code, among other AI products, as well as Claude.
Is MCP safe to use with my business accounts?
It can be, with discipline. Connect only the tools an agent needs, give it the narrowest permissions possible, keep a human approval step on anything that spends money or contacts clients, and only use servers from sources you trust.
Sources
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