AI’s USB-C Moment Is Here: It’s Called MCP

InnovationAI’s USB-C Moment Is Here: It’s Called MCPByBruce Kelley,Forbes Councils Member.for Forbes Technology CouncilCOUNCIL POSTExpertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based)May 11, 2026, 10:00am EDTBruce Kelley is CTO and SVP of NetScout, leading technology strategies for product and service solutions. getty​If you open a junk drawer in your house right now, you’ll probably find a graveyard of old cables: a proprietary Apple cord from five years ago, a Samsung charger from three years ago and a handful of others that don’t fit anything you own today.For a long time, enterprise software looked exactly like that drawer, with thousands of proprietary “cables” connecting data and tools. If you wanted your security software to feed your operations dashboard, you would hard-code a custom integration. It worked, but it was tedious, expensive and brittle.The consumer electronics industry eventually admitted that the model was unsustainable. It moved to USB-C, a standard connector that could power almost everything.Artificial intelligence is pushing a similar shift across technology.That standard is called the Model Context Protocol, or MCP. You don’t need to understand the engineering details, but you should understand what it represents. It signals a move away from tightly controlled vendor silos and toward a more open, agent-ready ecosystem.What Is MCP?MCP defines how AI models discover and interact with tools, data sources and capabilities in a structured way. It’s a framework that allows an AI model to connect to a database, a weather service or a security platform without requiring a custom integration for each.The impact of MCP will look a lot like the late 1980s, when enterprises began building networks.The Simple Network Management Protocol, or SNMP, became the universal connector of that era. It standardized the way devices reported information. SNMP led to the development of...