Diving deeper into Microsoft’s AI agent approach
Compared to what Microsoft is proposing, past “agentic” AI solutions that promised to use your computer for you aren’t quite as compelling. They’ve relied on looking at your computer’s screen and using that input to determine what to click and type. This new setup, in contrast, is neat — if it works as promised — because it lets an AI chatbot interact directly with any old traditional Windows PC app.
But the Model Context Protocol solution is even more advanced and streamlined than that. Rather than a chatbot having to put together a Spotify playlist by dragging and dropping songs in the old-fashioned way, it would give the AI the ability to give instructions to the Spotify app in a more simplified form.
On a more technical level, Microsoft will let application developers make their applications function as MCP servers — a fancy way of saying they’d act like a bridge between the AI models and the tasks they perform. There will be an MCP registry for Windows that apps like Copilot, ChatGPT, and Perplexity could use to discover available MCP servers running on your PC, then connect to them (with your permission) and run actions within them.
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