World's Fair 2025
Exposing Agents as MCP servers with mcp-agent: Sarmad Qadri
Overview
This talk introduces the Model Context Protocol (MCP) as a standardized interface for connecting Large Language Models (LLMs) to external tools and resources, aiming to simplify and enhance agent development. It posits that 2025 will be the year agents hit mass production, facilitated by advancements in LLM reasoning capabilities, the widespread adoption of MCP, and simpler agent architectures. The presentation also explores modeling agents as asynchronous workflows and exposing them as MCP servers for greater composability and scalability.
Who should watch
- AI Engineers
- Product Managers
- Builders working on agentic systems
- Developers seeking to integrate LLMs with tools and data
- Those interested in agent architecture and workflow orchestration
Key takeaways
- The agent tech stack in 2025 is characterized by improved LLM reasoning, the standardization of MCP for tool integration, and simplified agent architectures.
- MCP provides a unified interface for LLMs to access tools, data, and resources, moving away from fragmented, platform-specific connectors.
- Agents can be conceptualized as microservices and deployed as MCP servers, enabling seamless multi-agent interactions and composability.
- Agent applications are best modeled as asynchronous workflows, allowing for pausing, resuming, retrying, and human-in-the-loop interactions.
- The MCP agent library demonstrates how to build agent systems using MCP-native principles and asynchronous workflow orchestration tools like Temporal.
- Exposing agents as MCP servers allows them to be reused across any MCP-compatible client and offers benefits in scalability and durability by separating compute from the client.
- Complex agent tasks can be broken down into smaller, orchestrated steps using specialized agents (e.g., finder, proofreader, style enforcer) managed by an orchestrator agent.
Notable quotes
*2025 is the year that agents hit production on mass.*
*MCP is basically a standardized interface for connecting LLMs to tools to data to resources to the world around them.*
*Agents should be thought of as microservices and they can be deployed as MCP servers themselves.*
Unofficial community note. Prefer the recording for nuance.