AI Foundation & Introduction to MCP

MCP stands for Model Context Protocol.

It is one of the important technologies shaping the next generation of AI systems. Model Context Protocol, or simply MCP, is a protocol, or, in simple words, a standard way to communicate with different services.

Now, in order to understand MCP, first we need to understand few foundational terms:

• what an LLM is

• what agents like ChatGPT are

• the context with which an LLM works

• the tools which LLMs can utilize to get some work done

Let's dive into all of these foundational concepts before we jump back onto Model Context Protocol.

This is Module-1 of complete course on MCP along with hands-on labs.

Module-1 introduces the cocepts and build foundation, Module-2 gets deeper with hands-on labs to apply skills learned in Module-1.

Why you need MCP?

Imagine you're building an AI assistant.

Initially it can answer questions using only its training data.

But users immediately ask things like:

- Read my Gmail.

- Schedule a meeting.

- Fetch a document from Google Drive.

- Open a GitHub pull request.

- Query Snowflake.

- Look up customer information from Salesforce.

Without MCP, every AI application has to build custom integrations.

This simple idea of creating a standard protocol made it so simple for all the developers to equip LLM models with the tools. All the service providers, like GitHub, Google Drive, and CRMs like Salesforce, release their official version of MCP server, and they provide the full implementation of how somebody can interact with their services. It became as simple as giving the address of the tool to the LLM models, and the LLM models themselves can figure out how to interact with that tool.

Let's dive-in and learn one of the most important technologies shaping the next generation of AI systems.