An AI developer team maintains integrations between 8 AI models and 12 tools. Without MCP, how many custom integration adapters do they need? With MCP, how many?
Answer: 96 without MCP, 20 with MCP
Without a shared protocol, every model needs a custom adapter for every tool: 8 × 12 = 96 integrations. With MCP, each tool writes one server and each model writes one client: 8 + 12 = 20 connections. This N+M versus N×M reduction is the core value proposition.