Model Context Protocol (MCP)

An MCP server wraps a system, such as a CRM, a database or a file store, and exposes its data, tools and reusable prompts. An MCP client inside an AI application, such as Claude, ChatGPT, Visual Studio Code or Cursor, discovers what the server offers and calls it, with the server running on your machine or remotely over HTTP.

Before MCP, each AI app needed its own connector for each tool. MCP turns that into one server per tool that works with every compatible client; the MCP site compares it to a USB-C port for AI applications. Anthropic introduced and open-sourced it on November 25, 2024. 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.

For example, a founder connects a CRM's MCP server and an outbound platform's MCP server to Claude, then asks which of last week's demo no-shows have not had a follow-up. Claude queries the CRM, finds 7 contacts, drafts a short note for each and, after the founder approves, adds them to a follow-up sequence.

With MCP, an AI assistant can act in your sales tools, not just talk about them. With MCP servers for the CRM, the outbound platform and a data source, a rep can ask an assistant to find 50 heads of finance at Series B fintech companies, add them to a sequence and log it in the CRM, and the assistant works through each system's own permissions. A server acts with the access you grant it, so connect only servers you trust and check which tools can change data.