Agentic applications are only as powerful as the tools and data they can access. For an AI agent to do anything meaningful in an enterprise context, it must interact with core systems — applications, APIs, and databases.

However, enterprise data access is never just a technical concern. It comes with security, governance, reliability, and operational control requirements that cannot be ignored.

Over this year, Model Context Protocol (MCP) has rapidly emerged as a standard for exposing tools and data to AI agents. Almost every major vendor now provides MCP servers, and the open-source ecosystem is growing at an impressive pace.

This rapid adoption is great — but it has also created a new problem.