Why this matters now
Anthropic published the Model Context Protocol in November 2024 as an open standard for how AI applications connect to tools and data. By 9 December 2025 there were more than 10,000 active public MCP servers, and by mid-2026 more than 29,000 had been identified across registries. Forrester predicts 30 per cent of enterprise application vendors will launch their own MCP server during 2026.
For a marketing team the practical effect is the removal of the export step. Instead of somebody downloading a spreadsheet on Monday and an AI tool reasoning over a stale copy of it on Thursday, the tool queries live campaign data through one authenticated connection. HubSpot shipped a public beta MCP server giving agents native read, search and management access to CRM records, with nine tools at launch covering contacts, companies, deals, tickets, notes and engagements. Klaviyo's MCP server exposes profiles, campaigns, flows, lists, segments, events, metrics and templates.
This belongs to the stack configuration stage, and it introduces a selection criterion that did not exist two years ago. A platform without an MCP server is a platform an agent cannot reach without custom integration work, which moves a cost that used to sit in the marketing budget into the engineering backlog. That makes it a shared decision between the commercial and technical sides of a founding team rather than a marketing purchase, which is exactly the seam where alignment tends to fail.