Glossary

Model Context Protocol (MCP)

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard for connecting AI agents to the tools, data sources, and prompts they need, through a consistent client-server protocol.

MCP defines how an agent client (Claude, Cursor, your own agent runtime) discovers and invokes capabilities exposed by an MCP server — tools the agent can call, resources it can read, and prompts it can reuse. A single well-designed MCP server can be consumed by any MCP-aware client.

Before MCP, each agent framework had its own bespoke integration approach; MCP makes tool integrations portable. Organizations often build a "custom MCP" — an MCP server tailored to their proprietary tools, data sources, and governance requirements — which an off-the-shelf server cannot provide.

MCP is actively evolving; the spec is open and community-maintained, and the ecosystem of MCP servers covers CRMs, helpdesks, cloud platforms, and internal tooling.

See also
  • AI Agent— An AI agent is a software system that uses a large language model to perceive its environment, reason about tasks, and take actions in external systems on behalf of a user.
  • Tool Use (Function Calling)— Tool use — also called function calling — is the capability of a language model to emit structured calls to external tools, enabling an agent to take real actions in connected systems.
  • Multi-Agent Orchestration— Multi-agent orchestration is the practice of coordinating multiple specialized AI agents to accomplish a task that is too complex or too broad for a single agent.
Guide: What is a custom MCP?GrowTK AI Agents

More terms in the glossary

AI Agent

An AI agent is a software system that uses a large language model to perceive its environment, reason about tasks, and take actions in external systems on behalf of a user.

AI Voice Agent

An AI voice agent is an AI agent that interacts with users through voice — answering inbound calls, placing outbound calls, and conversing in real time.

AI Chatbot (AI Chat Agent)

An AI chatbot — more accurately, an AI chat agent — is an AI agent that interacts with users through text: web chat, WhatsApp, SMS, Slack, Teams, or social messaging.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is an architecture that grounds a language model's responses in a specific knowledge base by retrieving relevant passages at inference time and conditioning the response on them.

Multi-Agent Orchestration

Multi-agent orchestration is the practice of coordinating multiple specialized AI agents to accomplish a task that is too complex or too broad for a single agent.

Constitutional AI

Constitutional AI is an approach to training and deploying AI systems in which model behavior is guided by an explicit written set of principles — a "constitution" — rather than only by reinforcement from human feedback.

See the full glossary

Related pages

Enterprise AI Agents

How GrowTK builds and ships these concepts for clients.

Guides

Long-form walkthroughs that go deeper than definitions.

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