As generative AI evolves from simple chatbots into fully autonomous agents, the open‑source community faces a growing challenge: fragmentation. Without a shared way for AI systems to connect to tools, data, and infrastructure, the future risks becoming locked behind proprietary, single‑vendor ecosystems.
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) — recently donated to the Linux Foundation under the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) — offers a transformative solution. MCP acts as a universal adapter for agentic AI, cleanly separating business logic from prompts and enabling developers to build tool‑agnostic, vendor‑neutral agents.
This session provides a practical, grounded exploration of MCP, including demonstrations of how to build and deploy MCP servers to: