AI chatbots respond to prompts, but AI agents are much more interesting because they can take meaningful action on your behalf when you empower them with tools. In this talk we explain the concept of a tool and show how to allow an AI agent tool access through the emerging Model Context Protocol (MCP) standard. We will also survey the growing marketplace of MCP servers and how you can integrate them. Finally, we will consider how you can expose your own functionality through the MCP server standard.

By the end of this talk you should understand what tools are, why AI agents benefit from them, what role MCP plays, what problems it solves, when to use it, and how to create your own MCP-compatible tool.