Are you keeping an eye on your protocols?
If not, you may have missed the importance of the model context protocol (MCP), a tool that assists large language models to integrate and communicate with external data sources. As Alex Salazar, co-founder and CEO of agentic AI firm Arcade.dev, told IT Brew, the speed with which AI has taken over the tech industry—ChatGPT exploded onto the scene just three years ago, in November 2022—has led to a proliferation of tooling-like protocols, many of which never see adoption.
Competitive balance. An open-source framework developed by software company Anthropic, MCP quickly became one of the dominant protocols in a field where companies like IBM and Google are also major players. Google’s agent-to-agent (A2A) and IBM’s agent communication protocol (ACP) have seen less adoption, though, as research firm Everest Group found in June, that’s not set in stone, given how A2A and ACP are picking up steam: “Enterprises should align protocol use with their architecture—centralized (MCP), collaborative (A2A), or local-first (ACP).”
To Salazar, the interconnectedness protocol war is largely over. Once MCP was adopted by Anysphere’s popular AI-coding platform Cursor, developer interest exploded and MCP was propelled into the mainstream.
“It’s just just connectivity, period, and that war wasn’t terribly long because MCP ended up being one of the fastest, most buzzy protocols I’ve ever seen in my career in tech,” Salazar said.
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The protocol came into the conversation at a time when different companies and organizations were looking for tooling solutions that would allow AI systems to integrate and connect with each other and external systems without suffering security and efficiency lapses. What MCP offered, Salazar said, was standardization—an essential building block for the agentic AI technological revolution we are in the midst of.
“How do we get more value out of our AI investments? By connecting our AI to other systems so that we can get workflow automation,” Salazar said. “Because at the end of the day, having a chatbot give you advice is not terribly valuable—having an AI agent automate workflows, that’s huge. That’s ROI.”
Perspective. Dr. Petros Efstathopoulos, RSAC VP of research, cautioned that the protocols are all in early development, and there are some kinks still to be ironed out.
“MCP is relatively simple,” Efstathopoulos said. “A2A is slightly more complex in the sense that it can be extended to have some context and pass more additional information to the next stage—sometimes it provides too much information, if you ask me, but all of this is in early stages.”