Ola Hungerford
Principal Engineer at Nordstrom / MCP Maintainer
Tucson, Arizona, United States
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Ola Hungerford is a Principal Engineer supporting AI Enablement at Nordstrom, and a Maintainer and Community Lead for the Model Context Protocol. Her technical background spans over two decades, from early web platforms to personalization systems, enterprise architecture, and modern AI/ML systems. She's also a vocalist and songwriter who explores how technology can augment human creativity.
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Skills Over MCP: From Experiment to Extension
Tool descriptions tell an agent what a tool can do, but not how to orchestrate those capabilities toward a goal, or supplement them with specialized knowledge. Agent skills have become a popular and accessible way to close that gap, and many organizations now ship skills alongside their servers. The community effort to standardize that pairing has drawn 50+ contributors from 25+ organizations across the entire AI infrastructure stack: cloud platforms, data platforms, enterprise SaaS, gateways, and independent implementers. This talk covers where that momentum is headed, and how Extensions let the protocol evolve to meet real-world demand while balancing the stability, security, and developer experience that production systems require.
One-To-Many: Enabling MCP, Agents, and Intelligent Systems at Nordstrom
Natural language is becoming a universal interface. Connecting that interface to enterprise systems requires more than protocols. It requires active, thoughtful, and sustained work.
This talk shares Nordstrom's journey enabling MCP and AI agents across the organization: building secure MCP server standards, navigating OAuth and token management for agent workflows, and creating governance frameworks that let teams experiment while ensuring supportability. We'll cover practical challenges and solutions that make the C in MCP reliable, accurate and secure: knowledge feedback loops, layered access management, and evaluation techniques that make "one-to-many" enablement possible.
Beyond the technical, we'll also touch on the human systems work: coordinating across teams when AI initiatives emerge organically, building documentation that drives the right patterns from the start, and patiently creating the organizational foundations that let others follow and build on what you've started.
Attribution by Design: Skills, MCP, and Where Provenance Gets Built In
Agents increasingly draw on specialized human knowledge at inference time, and the infrastructure delivering it is converging around Skills, MCP, and very often a mix of the two. That makes these standards a decision point: provenance either travels with the knowledge or its absence becomes the default.
The MCP community is standardizing two complementary efforts: Interceptors (deterministic hooks in clients, servers, and gateways) and how, why, and when to serve Skills over MCP. This talk shows how the two fit together to standardize attribution for human expertise and other content encoded as Skills and related inference-time formats.
AGNTCon + MCPCon Europe 2026 Sessionize Event Upcoming
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