What Is an MCP Server? How AI Agents Connect to Tools Safely
An MCP server is the plug a model uses to reach a real system. Here's what that actually means — and what an enterprise-grade version of it has to do that a vanilla one doesn't.
An MCP server is the plug a model uses to reach a real system. Here's what that actually means — and what an enterprise-grade version of it has to do that a vanilla one doesn't.
Two analysts, two definitions of Revenue, both right, neither agreed. Here's an agent that queries the data directly and shows you the SQL.
Dashboards sit on a server, perfectly correct, and nobody opens them. The fix isn't a better dashboard — it's an agent that emails you what matters.
Two refund agents, same prompt. The one with 16 prompt rules buried the duplicate-detection signal under noise. The other caught it cleanly.
I built a weekend agent in ContextGate that watches a Gmail label, reads PDF receipts, extracts vendor/date/amount/category, and writes clean rows to a Google Sheet — flagging anything it isn't sure about. Here's how it works, and why governance lives outside the agent.