The Protocol That Every AI Company Is Quietly Building On | What is MCP? Ft. Marc Benioff
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MCP (Model Context Protocol), open-sourced by Anthropic in November 2024, is rapidly becoming the standard connectivity layer for AI agents and tools. Before MCP, every AI-to-tool integration required custom code; MCP standardizes this with a single protocol — analogous to USB-C for devices. It has reached 97 million monthly SDK downloads, 500+ public servers, and is supported by OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft. Salesforce is betting heavily on Slack as the primary AI interface layer, with Slack acting as both an MCP server and client, enabling bidirectional communication between agents and enterprise tools. The underlying Salesforce stack includes AgentForce for orchestration, Data 360 for federated/harmonized enterprise data, and Slack as the surface layer. Anthropic reportedly accelerated deal closures by 60% using this stack. The broader race among Microsoft (Teams/Copilot), Google (Gemini/Workspace), and OpenAI (Frontier) is fundamentally about who owns the interface between humans and AI agents, with MCP as the protocol layer underneath.