A team at a mid-size SaaS company spent six weeks building a custom integration layer so their AI agent could talk to Salesforce, Jira, Confluence, and their internal data warehouse. Four tools. Six weeks. The agent still couldn't handle OAuth token refresh without manual intervention every 48 hours.

Their competitor shipped the same capability in four days.

That gap - six weeks versus four days - is what Model Context Protocol 2.0 actually closes.

What MCP Is (and Why It Took This Long to Need It)

Model Context Protocol is an open standard released by Anthropic in November 2024 that defines a universal communication layer between AI applications and external tools, data sources, and services. Think of it as USB-C for AI agents: before USB-C, every device needed a different cable. Before MCP, every AI integration needed custom connector code.