Standards rarely look important when they first arrive. USB shipped in 1996 as one more port on a beige tower, and for years it was just a slightly easier way to plug in a mouse. The interesting thing about USB wasn’t the cable — it was that it eventually replaced every other cable.
MCP is the USB moment for agentic AI.
What MCP actually does
Stripped of marketing, MCP is a tiny protocol that lets any agent talk to any tool the same way. Before MCP, every integration was bespoke: your agent learned a hand-rolled adapter for Salesforce, another for GitHub, another for your internal data lake. Each adapter aged differently. Each broke in its own way.
MCP says: stop. Tools expose themselves through a single, boring contract. Agents discover and call them through that contract. The agent doesn’t know — and doesn’t need to know — what’s behind the boundary.
Why this changes the economics
Two things happen when integration becomes standardized.
First, the cost of adding a new tool to an agent collapses. What used to be a sprint of work becomes a config change. That’s not a 10× speedup; that’s a step-function change in what’s feasible to build.
Second, the moat for “AI integration vendors” gets thinner. If a B2B SaaS exposes itself via MCP, every agent on earth can use it tomorrow. The integration layer that startups have been raising money to build evaporates.
What it means for managed services
This is the part most people aren’t thinking about yet. Managed-services firms have built their margins on integration work — the long tail of wiring one enterprise system to another. MCP doesn’t kill that work, but it changes what’s valuable about it.
The high-margin work moves up the stack: choosing which tools belong in an agent’s toolbox, designing the policies that govern when each one fires, and running the observability that catches the bad decisions before they cost something. The wiring becomes commodity. The judgment doesn’t.
The next two years
USB took a decade to win. MCP will win faster, because the upside is more obvious and the incumbent integration patterns are weaker. If you’re building agents, build them MCP-first. If you’re selling tools, expose them via MCP yesterday. And if you’re running an enterprise IT org, start asking your vendors when their MCP servers ship — not whether.
The cable doesn’t seem important. Until everything plugs into it.