At 6 p.m. on Wednesday, June 18 at Embarc Collective, I’ll be presenting Intro to AI Agents with MCP, which will be a joint gathering of Tampa Bay Artificial Intelligence Meetup and Tampa Bay Python!
LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, and others are great for taking in natural language questions and producing complex but useful natural language replies.
However, they can’t do anything except output text. without the help of additional code. Until recently, the way to connect LLMs to other systems was to develop custom code for each LLM and each online system it connects to, which is an “m by n” problem.
One solution is MCP, short for “Model Context Protocol.” Introduced to world by Anthropic not too long ago, MCP is an open source, open standard that gives AI models connection to external data sources and tools. You could describe MCP as “a universal API for AIs to interact with online services.”
We’ll explain what it is, why it was made and how it came about, and then show you actual working code by building a simple MCP server connected to an LLM. Joey will demonstrate a couple of examples of MCP in action, and they’ll be examples that you can take home and experiment with!
Bring your laptop — you’ll have the opportunity to try out the MCP demos for yourself!
And yes, there’ll be food, and water and soft drinks will be provided. If that doesn’t work for you, feel free to bring your own.
Want to register (it’s free)? You can do so at either of the following Meetup pages: