Software is reorganizing around a new primitive: context.
Models have crossed a capability threshold, but their usefulness still hinges on timely data, business logic, and identity. Today, that context is scattered across SaaS dashboards, REST endpoints, spreadsheets, and tribal knowledge. Developers spend weeks building custom connectors, re-implementing auth, and fighting infrastructure every time a new AI assistant needs to "know" something. It doesn't scale.
In late 2024, the Model Context Protocol (MCP) reframed the problem. Instead of wiring each assistant to each data source, you publish context once as an MCP server and let any client consume it. Your coding assistant, your IDE, your customer service bot: they all speak the same language now. Reasoning (the loop) and context (the substrate) finally have a common interface.
Welcome to the context economy, where we stop building screens and start building curated knowledge services for autonomous users. The core problem shifts. You're no longer asking "How do I build a UI?" You're asking "How do I expose the minimal, stable, identity-aware surface that agents can reason over?"
What This Actually Looks Like
You know the drill. Sales call in 30 minutes. You've got 47 browser tabs open: CRM for history, Slack for the latest drama, Google Drive for that contract from six months ago, the wiki for pricing rules that may or may not be current, and Bob's spreadsheet with the special discounts that somehow became canon.
Tomorrow looks different. You open a chat interface: "prep me for the Acme Corp call."
The AI assistant pulls positioning from marketing's MCP server. Checks pricing guardrails from sales ops. Gets relationship history from CRM. Surfaces relevant contract terms from legal. You review, adjust the nuance where the AI missed context, and you're ready. Five minutes, not fifty.
But notice what just happened. The AI didn't scrape wikis or guess at policies. It called specific, versioned, access-controlled functions that teams maintain. Marketing owns their positioning. Sales ops owns their pricing rules. Legal owns their contract terms. And everyone's context stays fresh because they're maintaining executable services, not documentation that drifts.
The Deeper Shift
Every organization runs on shared workflows and unwritten rules. You know them:
- The runbook everyone bookmarks but nobody updates
- The wiki with three pages that matter and thirty that don't
- That one Slack thread with the actual answer
- Bob's spreadsheet (why is it always Bob?)
- The link dump you send every new hire
We've always curated context. MCP just makes it software.
But the key insight: curation over exhaustiveness. Don't mirror your entire data estate. Present the minimum, high-signal surface that gets work done. The 20% that handles 80% of requests.
And this brings us to something more profound. Craftspeople will distill themselves into a horcrux of an MCP server. A shard of durable expertise. The newest teammate can step into the mechsuit fashioned in the form of your best.
Think about it. Your best sales engineer's approach to technical objections becomes callable. Your star marketer's campaign intuition becomes executable. Your incident commander's decision tree becomes available to everyone on call. We don't replace these experts. We give everyone their superpowers.
How Ownership Changes
Marketing won't own the marketing wiki anymore. They'll own the marketing MCP server. It enforces vocabulary, funnels, segment definitions, and launch calendars as tools with inputs and outputs. No more prose that drifts. No more "I think the latest version is..."
Sales ops won't pass around prep docs. They'll maintain the sales MCP server with pricing rules, discount limits, and mutual-close checklists expressed as callable functions. Tribal memory becomes operational reality.
DevOps won't rely on lore passed down through generations of on-call engineers. They'll operate the on-call MCP server: runbooks, service dependencies, and incident procedures as durable, auditable actions.
And the interface? Not another dashboard. A chat UI wired to these servers, where the assistant composes tools on demand. The same context works everywhere: Slack, CLI, customer-facing bots. Write once, use anywhere.
The Hidden Problem: AI's Inequality Crisis
You've seen this movie before. AI rolls out across your organization. Some people log into ChatGPT, ask it to "write my codebase," get garbage, never return. Others? They spend weeks crafting perfect prompts. Building elaborate context documents. Creating their personal knowledge gardens. Tweaking, refining, obsessing.
The first group sees no value. The second group becomes 10x more productive.
Your organization develops extreme inequality in AI leverage. A high Gini coefficient for who succeeds with AI. Your highest performers pull further ahead while everyone else falls behind. And here's the thing: it's not a skills gap. It's a context gap.
MCP flips this. When your highest performers distill their craft into an MCP server, they pull up ALL performers. That meticulously crafted sales prompt your top AE spent months perfecting? Every AE can use it now. The debugging approach your principal engineer developed? Available to every developer on the team.
This democratizes excellence.
Building the Platform for This Future
Most teams can't even start capturing their context. Why? Standing up OAuth servers. Managing versioning. Implementing access controls. You spend months on plumbing before encoding a single line of expertise.
FastMCP makes the hard parts trivial:
- Authentication integrates with your existing identity providers (no custom OAuth implementations)
- Versioning and deployment work like modern software (push to git, get a preview environment)
- Access controls and audit logs come built-in (your compliance team can actually sleep)
- Protocol handling, error management, and scaling live at the platform layer
You focus on one thing: encoding your expertise. Take your workflows, your resources, your carefully crafted prompts. Version them. Test them. Share them. Guard them. Start shipping your craft in days, not months.
FastMCP (the framework) and FastMCP Cloud (the platform) ship together for a reason. We're building the infrastructure that makes the context economy possible. Teams stop fighting infrastructure and start shipping interfaces.
A 2-5 Year Map: How Work Will Transform
Years 1-2: The Obvious Moves
Progressive teams publish MCP servers for their most painful workflows. "Prep" and "research" tasks shift from human assembly to AI synthesis. Wiki pages transform into executable context services. Early adopters see 10x productivity gains on routine work.
You'll know it's working when new hires stop asking for documentation links.
Years 2-3: The Organizational Shift
Job descriptions include "maintains the X context server." Craftspeople compete to encode their expertise. The best versions become organizational standards. External context providers emerge: regulatory compliance, industry intelligence, market data. All subscribable, all identity-aware.
Performance reviews start measuring quality of context curation alongside execution. Because maintaining the sales MCP server that powers 100 reps? That's leverage.
Years 3-5: The New Normal
Organizations compete on how well they've distilled their craft. A marketplace of context emerges. You subscribe to best practices like you subscribe to data feeds.
Routing replaces orchestration at the edge. AI selects minimal context per task, per user, per moment. Work focuses on judgment, relationships, and exceptions. Everything codifiable runs through context.
The companies that win? They're the ones that turned their operational excellence into software first.
What This Means Now
The future of work means craftspeople distilling their expertise so both humans and AI can wield it. When teams own their context servers, they own their craft. When they publish them, everyone moves faster.
Start with one painful workflow. Build an MCP server for it. Let your team interact through chat instead of clicking through systems. Measure the time saved. Then expand.
The strategic reality: Organizations that win will be those that best capture and share their operational excellence. Not in documents that drift. In context services that execute.
This shift is as inevitable as the move from files to databases, from desktop to cloud. The only question is whether you'll lead or follow.
An Invitation
FastMCP and FastMCP Cloud exist to make that first step trivial and the next steps obvious.
The future of work isn't more apps. It's better context. Fresh, curated, identity-aware, flowing to wherever decisions get made.
We're building the platform for the context economy and the future of work. Let's build it together.