Synopsis: Model Context Protocol (MCP) started life as a developer convenience — a clean way for AI agents to reach out to tools and data without a bespoke integration for every service. What changes now is scale. Enterprises want agents talking to real internal systems, not laptops, and the protocol has to grow up to match.
Mike Vizard sits down with Clare Liguori, senior principal software engineer at Amazon Web Services, to unpack why this update matters more than a typical protocol revision. Enterprises are wrapping existing APIs in MCP servers so agents can reach ticketing systems, HR policies, operational data and internal business services directly. Instead of a user bouncing between web apps, an agent can operate across those tools on the user’s behalf — but only if the connective layer underneath is something a security team is willing to sign off on.
Liguori walks through how the newer specification aligns more closely with OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect, which gives enterprises stronger identity controls and a much clearer picture of what any given agent is actually authorized to do. Sandboxing gets similar attention. Plenty of MCP servers still run locally today, which exposes laptops and developer environments in ways that were fine for experimentation and are not fine for production. As agents multiply, the protection has to cover the agent, the server and the environment around them.
The serverless angle is where the architecture story really lands. Agents create bursty, non-human traffic — a person reads a page slowly, an agent fires dozens of requests in a few seconds — and stateless MCP fits that shape without requiring long-running infrastructure to sit idle between spikes. Liguori also flags in-flight extensions around tasks, triggers and events, which point toward agents starting long-running jobs, waiting on webhooks and reacting to real-time signals. For enterprise teams, the takeaway is that this is not just a protocol update. It is the standardized agent infrastructure layer starting to arrive, and the organizations building on it now are the ones who will not have to rebuild later.