Dr. Terry Oroszi, Vice Chair and Associate Professor, Boonshoft School of Medicine, Wright State University.getty​The companies that win the next phase of AI will not own the biggest model. They will own the most mobile workforce.Picture hiring a brilliant consultant, then realizing that before she can open a single spreadsheet, you have to gut your server room and build her a custom terminal. Now do that again for the next consultant. And the next. That is roughly how most enterprises integrate AI today.Every time we want an agent to read a local database, reach a secure file share or pull from a regulated registry, someone builds a one-off pipeline to make it happen. The pipeline is fragile; it serves exactly one tool paired with exactly one AI system, and it breaks the moment either side changes. Wire up 10 tools across five AI systems the old way, and you are maintaining 50 brittle connections. The integration work scales by multiplication, and multiplication is how budgets and timelines die.There is a better model, and it comes from a simple shift in who adapts to whom.Stop changing the building. Change what they carry.The open-source Model Context Protocol, or MCP, flips the problem. Instead of rebuilding every environment to suit the AI, you give the AI a standardized way to plug into any environment. I think of it as a backpack. Some of you will remember the children's book where the bag holds exactly the right tool for every situation. That is the picture.Here is the part worth getting right, because it is where most explanations go wrong. The tools do not live inside the agent. The database, the registry and the file share all belong to the environment. What the agent carries in the backpack is a universal adapter and the roster of what it is cleared to use. Same plugs, any wall. My agents (I call them staff) never have to learn the host platform's native wiring. They reach for the one connection method that works everywhere, and they are off.That distinction changes three things that land directly on the bottom line.1. Your AI staff keep their reach wherever they go.Move a specialized agent from a desktop application to a cloud pipeline to a partner's stack, and it does not lose a step. The way it connects is identical in all three places. You are no longer rebuilding capability every time the deployment context changes. The skillset travels because the connection standard travels with it.2. You stop paying the multiplication tax.This is the math that matters. Under the old approach, every new tool paired with every new model meant another custom connector. Under an open protocol, each tool exposes itself once, and each agent learns the protocol once. Fifty bespoke pipelines collapse toward 15: 10 tools wired one time each, five agents that all speak the same standard. Addition instead of multiplication. That is the difference between an integration backlog that grows with your ambition and one that flattens.3. You deploy fast, and you govern at the door.Here is the nuance a careful technology leader will insist on, and rightly so. The backpack does not turn your agent into a sealed black box that carries its own security around with it. Access is governed at the environment, at the server and at the credential layer, which is exactly where it should be. You grant a staff member access to a given environment once, and that grant is enforced, audited and revoked where the tool actually lives.So yes, you can drop a specialized agent into a new client site quickly. The condition is that the site speaks the protocol and you provision the agent's access there. That is not a limitation to hide. It is the feature that lets a CISO say yes.Equip the workforce, not the building.The instinct in most organizations is still to rebuild the entire IT estate around whatever AI tool arrived last quarter. That instinct is backward, and it gets more expensive every time you act on it.The winners in this next phase will not be the teams with the single largest model. They will be the teams whose agents are versatile, mobile and governed. The teams who equipped a workforce instead of remodeling a house. Hand your agents a backpack. Then let them get to work.​Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?