What is MCP & why it's a big (huge) deal:
(model context protocol)
TLDR: MCP makes it possible for AI Tools to use external tools. E.g. Chatbot/IDE/AI-Agent can use Gmail/GoogleDrive/WeatherApp etc.
Detailed explanation for both, tech & non tech people (+demos):
1) AI Tools (chatbots, wrappers, agents, code generator, etc) wanna talk to external systems.
In pre-MCP world, one would have to write code to connect AI tool to the external system via API. Which meant every connection had to be pre-coded.
It also meant that every AI tool had to hard code its connection to every other tool. So if there are 1000 AI tools and 1000 external tools, then 1000000 hard-coded connections via API.
2) MCP is a standard protocol. This means that every AI tool has to implement this once, and then it can connect to thousands of external tools via this protocol.
3) The same goes for external tools. They all have to create an MCP server just once, and all AI tools that support MCP can connect to them.
4) It's a huge deal. Imagine 10k AI tools and 10k external tools now all have to implement MCP just once each. So it's 20k implementations. Versus 10k*10k=100M implementations.
5) This whole thing can also run on the cloud or on local computer.
See demos:
