This Week's Term: MCP Apps - an official extension to the Model Context Protocol (MCP) that allows AI tools to return interactive user interfaces - dashboards, forms, visualizations, workflows - directly inside the AI conversation, rather than just text.
In Issue #12, I introduced term MCP - the open standard that acts as a "USB-C port for AI," letting AI models connect to external tools and data sources through a universal interface. Since then, MCP has grown rapidly. It was donated to the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation, co-founded by Anthropic, Block and OpenAI. Over 500 public MCP servers exist today, and the protocol is supported across Claude, ChatGPT, VS Code, and many other platforms.
But MCP had a limitation. Tools could send data back to the AI, and the AI could summarize it in text - but users couldn't interact with the results directly. If a tool returned a hundred rows of sales data, you'd have to prompt your way through it: "Show me last week's numbers." "Sort by revenue." "What's in row 47?" Every interaction required another message.
MCP Apps, announced in late January 2026, closes this gap. Now, when an AI tool returns results, it can also return an interactive interface - a chart you can filter, a form you can fill out, a map you can explore, a document you can review and annotate - all rendered inside the conversation. The AI stays in the loop and sees what you're doing, but the interface handles what text alone can't: sorting, filtering, clicking, dragging, and real-time updates.
For business leaders, this matters because it changes what AI-powered tools can feel like. Instead of a back-and-forth text exchange to explore data or configure a system, users get a familiar, visual experience - embedded right where they're already working. It connects directly to this issue's theme: the experience layer is becoming as important as the intelligence layer.
As Block's Andrew Harvard put it in its announcement, the industry has been embedding assistants into individual apps, creating fragmented experiences. MCP inverts this - making apps pluggable components within agents. MCP Apps takes it further by bringing user interfaces into the agent experience itself. The same MCP App works across Claude, ChatGPT, VS Code, and Goose without writing client-specific code.
In the video below Den Delimarsky explains the importance of this move and how to get started.