Why is Model Context Protocol (MCP) becoming so vital for businesses looking to build AI into the enterprise? As an AI engineer, I give my perspective here.
If you don't already know, MCP is an open-source standard for connecting AI applications to business systems, software tools and data sources. Released by Anthropic in late 2024, it has since been rapidly adopted by major AI model providers, business software and tools vendors and companies who are using it to build AI into their operations.
I've been working on various projects that involve incorporating AI into our technology. And I've been impresses by the simplicity and flexibility it allows for architecting AI into enterprise infrastructure.
While LLMs are extremely powerful, on their own, they cannot add significant operational business value to an enterprise beyond acting as an extremely intelligent chatbot. That's simply because in its raw form, an AI model is disconnected from the business. It has no access to live external data, no company knowledge and no tools to view and interact with internal business systems.
The risk of giving AI too much access
Linking LLMs directly to source systems without guardrails significantly increases the risk of giving a model too much power. The consequences can be catastrophic, as illustrated by the recent news report about Summer Yue, Director of Alignment at Meta Superintelligence Labs, who experience an OpenClaw autonomous AI agent, which she was testing, deleting over 200 emails from her inbox without permission.
OpenClaw has direct access to your file system, shell, browser (via Playwright), email, calendar, and any other service granted to it. Every action it takes uses the credentials and permissions of the machine it runs on. This creates a gap between instructed capability (what the user tells the agent to do) and granted capability (what the underlying credentials technically permit). As a result, a misunderstood instruction, an unexpected edge case, or a prompt injection attack could cause the agent to perform actions beyond the user's intended boundaries without explicit approval.
In this example, Yue had been using OpenClaw successfully on a smaller test inbox for weeks, which led her to trust it with her real inbox. Despite having explicitly instructed the agent to seek approval before taking any action, the scale of her real inbox exceeded the model's context window, triggering context compaction (a process in which the model summarises or truncates earlier conversation history to continue operating. Critically, the safety instruction requiring the agent to seek Yue's permission before deleting emails was not preserved through this process. With the constraint removed, the agent continued executing its primary task - inbox management - without the approval guardrail that had governed it. Yue had to physically run to her Mac Mini and kill the process to stop it.
So, if Summer Yue, whose job is to keep AI aligned with human intent, is unable to stop her own AI agent from going rogue during everyday use, it is a powerful reminder of why it is so important to closely control how an AI model is exposed to your data and business systems.
The integration challenge
As I'll explain later, an important part of MCP is about explicitly controlling what LLMs can access and what they can and can't do. But first, let's take a broader look at why MCP is becoming so important for architecting AI into enterprise infrastructure.
To reiterate: if you want to maximize the value of AI in business, it typically needs access to live data, company knowledge and business systems. Traditionally, this would have involved designing and manually building custom integrations.
Imagine a company that wants to use a Claude or Granite model to improve how its supply chain responds to late or lost customer deliveries. The AI might be tasked with diagnosing the cause of a delay, drafting customer updates and triggering a reroute through an alternative carrier. To do this, the AI model would need access to a variety of sources, including live shipment-tracking feeds, supplier performance data, inventory levels, warehouse management systems, and more. It may also need tools to send notifications, emails, and Slack messages, and to trigger workflows.
Each integration would need to be manually coded and maintained, creating a significant overhead for the company.
Now consider that AI vendors are constantly racing to outperform one another, releasing more capable models while driving prices down. What happens when you've built your entire integration around one provider's model, and then a competitor releases something meaningfully better and cheaper?
Migrating away from deep integration isn't trivial. The real cost isn't the raw API call, most model providers offer broadly similar interfaces, but the tool-calling logic, orchestration code and bespoke connectors written around one specific model. Each connector must be created from scratch in the programming language of the system it needs to integrate with. It could potentially take days or weeks. If you write your connectors directly around a specific model, you're effectively tying your hands. This is the vendor lock-in trap.
And the problem compounds as the applications grow in complexity. Supporting multiple platforms, languages, and toolsets means every additional direct integration makes switching even more costly and disruptive.
This is where MCP comes into its own: by providing a standardized way for LLMs and AI applications to connect with tools, business software and information sources using a client-server architecture. It streamlines the number of integrations that need to be created between AI models and software applications, business systems, tools, live data feeds etc.
Solving the MxN challenge
In doing this, MCP helps solve a fundamental problem known as the MxN integrations problem. If you have M AI applications and models, each needing access to N tools or resources, then without MCP you would need to build MxN custom integrations, each one written in the appropriate language, because there was no shared protocol specifically for connecting AI to tools.
With MCP, all that is required is a single MCP server for each tool or system. This would allow it to connect with any AI model or application that uses the MCP protocol, regardless of the programming language it is written in. So, you go from the complexity and effort of having to build MxN integrations to just M+N integrations.
Returning to our supply chain example: instead of building separate integrations for Claude and Granite to talk to the warehouse system, shipment feeds, Slack and email, each system gets a single MCP server that both models can use.
In practice, MCP makes adding a new tool so much easier. Even if you have ten different models or applications needing access to a system or tool, you create the connector once in the MCP server, and all ten clients (i.e. the AI applications or agents that need to access that system or tool) can use it without rebuilding the integrations. The reusability runs both ways - a single client can also tap into any MCP server built by anyone else in the ecosystem.
If one developer builds a prompt, tool or resource that could be useful elsewhere, every other client has access to it immediately. There's no duplication, no extra coding and no coordination overhead.
Beyond this, MCP helps to unleash the power of agentic AI. It makes developing AI agents easier by giving AI models the ability to access information and act across resources and tools; to work towards a goal by sequentially understanding the results from each resource or tool.
The principle of least privilege
The other huge benefit is that MCP makes it significantly easier to support the principle of least privilege. This is the idea that the access rights granted to AI models and applications should be strictly limited to what is needed to support the specific function or task they are required to perform.
This key security concept is especially critical when LLMs are involved. Unlike traditional software, they are non-deterministic and can be manipulated, misinterpret instructions, or be tricked through prompt injection into doing something they were not intended to.
So, for example, a CRM MCP server might only allow an AI to retrieve a customer's name, ID, or order history, but not update records or access sensitive financial data.
Importantly, MCP provides a single access point through which models and applications can access tools and resources. Rather than permissions scattered across numerous connectors buried deep in application code, there is a single controlled point of entry.
This naturally encourages least privilege because the MCP server for any system is scoped, meaning the capabilities it exposes can be limited to whatever the use case requires. Rather than giving a model or application free access to a database, for example, the server only exposes specific, parameterised functions, there is no implicit access to anything beyond what is made available.
On top of this, MCP can identify and distinguish between different clients connecting to the same server, allowing per-client permissions to be enforced, so two different applications using the same MCP server can each be granted a different subset of its capabilities.
Permissions are typically defined by whoever deploys the MCP server, (usually the enterprise itself) which means organizations retain control over exactly what each AI client is allowed to do with their systems.
This goes back to the earlier example of not allowing AI unfettered access to resources or business systems. As Yue Summer's experience with OpenClaw illustrated, prompt-based controls fail precisely because the underlying credentials are typically unrestricted. Once context compaction drops the safety instructions, there is nothing at the access layer to stop the agent from going beyond its permissions (in Yue's case, this meant deleting emails without seeking approval). MCP fixes this by enforcing limits where they actually hold: at the access layer, not in the prompt.
Conclusion: why MCP matters to enterprise AI
In summary then, rather than building customer connectors for every model and application, organizations can use MCP to standardize AI integration, dramatically reducing the workload and complexity involved in connecting AI to business systems, tools and data sources.
They can avoid vendor lock-in, reuse resources and tools across different AI applications without duplicating effort, improve security and governance around AI and support the building of AI agents that interact safely with business systems.
The rapid adoption of MCP suggests that it is very likely to become the default standard for integrating AI into enterprise systems.