An agent asks for data, and the server hands it back. AWS's James Ward thinks that leaves a lot on the table. The protocol works best, he told me, when the server acts less like a database and more like another voice in the conversation.
Ward is a principal developer advocate at AWS and sits on the technical committee of the Agentic AI Foundation, the Linux Foundation group that now houses MCP. I sat down with him last week at AGNTCon + MCPCon in San Jose the day before he and co-presenter Alexander Ioffe were set to give a session on moving MCP from a basic API to an agent integration interface. "Many times our MCP servers are just these APIs, like 'get me the customers,' and that is a good place to start," Ward said.
