MCP Dev Summit North America: Full Schedule

April 2-3, 2026
New York, NY
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IMPORTANT NOTE: Timing of sessions and room locations are subject to change.

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11:50am EDT

Building MARVIN: What Teaching a Non-Technical Marketer To Use MCP Taught Me About AI Adoption - Sterling Chin, Postman

Thursday April 2, 2026 11:50am - 12:15pm EDT

Juilliard Complex (5th Floor)

Over the 2025 holiday break, I built MARVIN, an AI assistant that connects to my email, calendar, Jira, Confluence, and meeting notes through MCP servers. The most surprising lessons came from teaching a non-technical friend in marketing to use it. Within a day, she took a task that typically required 4+ hours and completed it in 30 minutes.

In this talk, I'll share practical insights from building and deploying MCP-powered agents in real workflows:

- Architecture decisions: How I structured MCP servers for Gmail, Google Calendar, Jira, and other integrations, and where I got it wrong
- The "junior intern" pattern: Why treating AI agents like trainable assistants drives real usage
- The naming problem: Why "MCP" is a terrible name for mainstream adoption and what we should call it instead
- Curiosity over mandates: Why top-down AI adoption fails, and what ground-up adoption looks like

I'll walk through 25 minutes of hard-won lessons from building something real, watching people use it, and iterating based on what actually worked.

Speakers

Sterling Chin

Founding Developer Advocate, Inngest

Sterling Chin is a Founding Developer Advocate, where he focuses on AI-powered API development and the intersection of agents and APIs. At Postman, he lead the team that shipped 7 new products in 2.5 years including Postman's first AI Assistant, and now spends his time helping developers... Read More →

Building MARVIN MCP Dev Summit pdf

Thursday April 2, 2026 11:50am - 12:15pm EDT
Juilliard Complex (5th Floor)

Apps and Agents, MCP Best Practices

Audience Experience Level Intermediate
Session Slides Yes

11:50am EDT

Sponsored Session: The Self-Improving MCP Server: Agents in a Live Development Loop - Enrico Toniato, Manufact

Thursday April 2, 2026 11:50am - 12:15pm EDT

Marquis Ballroom (9th Floor)

What if your AI agent could build and refine its own MCP server while you watch? We'll demonstrate a live development loop where coding agents iterate on MCP servers and UI widgets in real time . no restarts, no broken workflows. Using hot module reloading for both the protocol primitives and the UI, agents can preview and refine their output in real time.

In order to facilitate networking and business relationships at the event, you may choose to visit a third party's booth or access sponsored content. You are never required to visit third party booths or to access sponsored content. When visiting a booth or participating in sponsored activities, the third party will receive some of your registration data. This data includes your first name, last name, title, company, address, email, standard demographics questions (i.e. job function, industry), consenting to receipt and use of such data by the third-party recipients, which will be subject to their own privacy policies.

Speakers

Enrico Toniato

CTO, Manufact (formerly mcp-use)

CTO at Manufact (formerly mcp-use)Prev AI tech lead at IBM ResearchAchieved SoTA in Text2SQLPresented at NeurIPSRobotics @ ETH Zurich

MCP Dev Summit Slides (3) pdf

Thursday April 2, 2026 11:50am - 12:15pm EDT
Marquis Ballroom (9th Floor)

Apps and Agents

Session Slides Yes

11:50am EDT

What if MCP was Symmetric? - Jerome Swannack, Anthropic

Thursday April 2, 2026 11:50am - 12:15pm EDT

Broadway Ballroom North (6th Floor)

* What if MCP was Symmetric? An exploration on what would be possible if servers could call tools from clients.

Speakers

Jerome Swannack

Member of Technical Staff, Anthropic

New Zealander living in London, helped build MCP at Anthropic

Symmetric MCP Screenshots pptx

Thursday April 2, 2026 11:50am - 12:15pm EDT
Broadway Ballroom North (6th Floor)

Protocol in Depth

Audience Experience Level Intermediate
Session Slides Yes

11:50am EDT

Securing MCP at Scale: From Principles To Production - Peter Smulovics, Morgan Stanley

Thursday April 2, 2026 11:50am - 12:15pm EDT

Empire Complex (7th Floor)

As MCP adoption accelerates across platforms, the risks of giving LLMs tool access are growing quickly. This session explores the real threat surface of MCP systems: prompt injection, tool poisoning, unsafe permissions, supply-chain “rug pulls,” cross-tool escalation, and data-exfiltration risks that arise when agents can call arbitrary tools. Building on Microsoft's recent work hardening MCP on Windows, we outline a practical reference architecture for secure deployments: signed and verified tool manifests, unique server identities, scoped capabilities, sandboxed execution, authenticated connections, governance via registries, audit logging, and runtime anomaly detection. Attendees will leave with a blueprint for running MCP in production: what to lock down, how to operate it safely, and how enterprises can integrate MCP into existing security, IAM, and compliance frameworks. This talk equips developers, architects, and security teams to build safer agentic systems and contribute to a more secure MCP ecosystem.

Speakers

Peter Smulovics

Distinguished Engineer, Morgan Stanley

Peter Smulovics is a Distinguished Engineer at Morgan Stanley with 15+ years at the firm and 30+ in the industry. A 2× Microsoft MVP and co-creator of C#, he serves as Vice Chair of FINOS (Linux Foundation) Technical Oversight Committee and leads Open Source Readiness. He focuses... Read More →

Securing MCP at Scale pdf

Thursday April 2, 2026 11:50am - 12:15pm EDT
Empire Complex (7th Floor)

Security and Operations

Audience Experience Level Intermediate
Session Slides Yes

12:20pm EDT

MCP for Autonomous Storefronts: Building Self-Healing Agent Loops - Guilherme Rodrigues, decocms.com

Thursday April 2, 2026 12:20pm - 12:45pm EDT

Juilliard Complex (5th Floor)

Most MCP integrations power chat: an agent responds to a prompt. But MCP can power continuous loops — agents that run on schedule, find issues, and ship fixes without human prompting.

This talk covers how to build MCP servers for autonomous operations. The core pattern: Detect → Analyze → Propose → Execute → Report. Each loop queries MCP resources, processes data, and takes action based on its trust level.

I'll show three examples from e-commerce: (1) a learnings database — optimization patterns exposed as MCP resources that agents query to diagnose codebases; (2) CDN observability — requests, bandwidth, cache rates as queryable resources for finding performance issues; (3) conversion analytics — pageview and conversion data that agents correlate to propose content changes.

The key design question: when can agents act autonomously vs. require human approval? I'll present a trust framework where loops graduate from report-only → PR with review → auto-merge based on accuracy over time.

Takeaways: how to structure domain expertise as MCP resources, architecture for connecting observability to agents, and patterns for safe autonomous execution.

Speakers

Guilherme Rodrigues

CEO & Co-Founder, decocms.com

Co-founder & CEO of decocms.com, an open-source framework for building and deploying MCP-based Internal AI Platforms. Previously spent 9 years at VTEX through its NYSE IPO, where he led the first version of the Store Framework and VTEX IO Developer Platform. Based in Rio de Janeiro... Read More →

deco mcp dev summit compressed pdf

Thursday April 2, 2026 12:20pm - 12:45pm EDT
Juilliard Complex (5th Floor)

Apps and Agents

Audience Experience Level Intermediate
Session Slides Yes

12:20pm EDT

Evolution, Not Revolution: How MCP Is Reshaping OAuth - Aaron Parecki, Okta

Thursday April 2, 2026 12:20pm - 12:45pm EDT

Broadway Ballroom North (6th Floor)

The impulse to rewrite the auth stack for AI agents is strong, but we cannot design away the fundamental relationships standards protect. This session explores how MCP is reshaping OAuth—not abandoning it—to meet the ecosystem's unique challenges:

The "Unregistered Client" Problem: Traditional OAuth requires pre-registration. MCP breaks this. We’ll see how Client ID Metadata Documents (CIMD) allow agents to bring their own identities to arbitrary servers, how it improves on Dynamic Client Registration, and how to mitigate the risks of unregistered clients.

Separation of Concerns: Why your MCP server shouldn't be your Authorization Server. We’ll cover how Protected Resource Metadata (RFC 9728) enables dynamic auth server discovery, keeping agents lightweight and security boundaries clean.

Enterprise-Managed Authorization: To stop "click-through fatigue," we’ll introduce the Identity Assertion Authorization Grant. This moves consent to the enterprise policy layer, enabling secure, scalable adoption.

Join me to secure the agent ecosystem—from discovery to governance—not by reinventing the wheel, but by making incremental improvements to the way it turns.

Speakers

Aaron Parecki

Director of Identity Standards, Okta

Aaron Parecki is Director of Identity Standards at Okta, and active in multiple standards development organizations including IETF, OpenID Foundation, W3C, and MCP. He is an editor of OAuth 2.1 along with several other OAuth specifications, and has been influential in shaping how... Read More →

Evolution not Revolution How MCP is Reshaping OAuth Aaron Parecki pdf

Thursday April 2, 2026 12:20pm - 12:45pm EDT
Broadway Ballroom North (6th Floor)

Protocol in Depth

Audience Experience Level Intermediate
Session Slides Yes

12:50pm EDT

Building Multi-Turn Agentic Workflows With MCP: Lessons From Avatar Generation at Roblox - Rohan Gangaraju & Jason Ding, Roblox

Thursday April 2, 2026 12:50pm - 1:15pm EDT

Juilliard Complex (5th Floor)

Creative assembly tasks - where agents compose pieces into coherent wholes - present unique challenges: tracking progress across turns, validating outputs, and recovering when something doesn't fit. This talk shares patterns for multi-turn workflows, illustrated through avatar generation where an agent assembles clothing into cohesive outfits.
Pattern 1: Session Memory - Track selections, failed searches, and partial progress across turns. Know what's in the cart before suggesting more.
Pattern 2: Composite Tools - Combine operations (search + fetch thumbnails) into single tools that reduce round-trips and give agents richer context.
Pattern 3: Pre-flight Validation - Check compatibility before expensive operations. Catch conflicts early (clashing items, missing pieces) rather than failing at generation.
Pattern 4: Validate-and-Retry Loops - Use VLM scoring on outputs, track best-of-N attempts, and guide agents toward improvements when quality falls short.
Avatar generation makes these patterns concrete - "getting dressed" is intuitive - but they apply broadly to document assembly, configuration builders, and any workflow composing parts into wholes.

Speakers

Rohan Gangaraju

Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Roblox

Rohan Gangaraju is a Senior Machine Learning Engineer on the Economy ML team at Roblox, where he works on building recommendation systems for virtual economy and avatar marketplace. He holds a CS degree from UMass Amherst.

Jason Ding

Software Engineer, Roblox

Jason Ding is a Software Engineer at Roblox, where he drives Avatar Generation efforts focused on ML powered avatar creation. He holds degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and Business from UC Berkeley through the M.E.T. program.

Roblox Avatar generation pdf

Thursday April 2, 2026 12:50pm - 1:15pm EDT
Juilliard Complex (5th Floor)

Apps and Agents

Audience Experience Level Intermediate
Session Slides Yes

12:50pm EDT

Golem To Murderbot: Challenges With Agentic Security Delegation Via MCP - Michael Schwartz, Gluu

Thursday April 2, 2026 12:50pm - 1:15pm EDT

Empire Complex (7th Floor)

To implement "Zero Trust", authorization must be enforced consistently across every layer: inside the agent, in the cloud (like MCP gateways and services), and down to the database. Each layer needs its own dynamic authorization decision engine, yet those decisions must remain aligned and explainable.

As AI agents become first-class actors in enterprise systems, traditional security models start to strain. This session examines how agentic workflows challenge today’s delegation mechanisms, especially when agents act autonomously, chain operations, or cross trust boundaries. We’ll explore where OAuth works well and where it falls short.

The session argues for centralized policy management using Cedar, decoupled from application code to prevent policy drift. It will introduce emerging governance models like GovOps, which treat policies, schemas, and authorization logic as managed assets with lifecycle controls and automated compliance. Attendees will leave with a practical ideas for secure agent delegation and governing agentic systems at scale.

The discussion frame is two narratives: a 15th century myth and a 2025 Apple TV mini-series based Martha Wells' books.

Speakers

Michael Schwartz

Founder / CEO, Gluu

Mike is the founder of cybersecurity software vendor Gluu, BD of the Linux Foundation Janssen Project, and twice a week hosts the livestream Identerati Office Hours. He is also author of "Securing the Perimeter" (Apress 2018) about open source digital identity. His podcast "Open Source... Read More →

Static MCP Dev Summit March 2026 pdf

Thursday April 2, 2026 12:50pm - 1:15pm EDT
Empire Complex (7th Floor)

Security and Operations

Audience Experience Level Intermediate
Session Slides Yes

12:50pm EDT

Sponsored Session: Who's Driving? Delegation and the Confused Deputy Problem for AI Agents - Vitor Balocco & Alvaro Inckot, Runlayer

Thursday April 2, 2026 12:50pm - 1:15pm EDT

Marquis Ballroom (9th Floor)

When an AI agent holds your OAuth token, what stops it from acting beyond your intent? We'll cover why OAuth 2.1 alone isn't enough for agentic AI, how the industry is responding (NIST, IETF, major identity vendors), and how to implement delegation that gives agents scoped, auditable, revocable permission to act on behalf of users.

Speakers

Alvaro Inckot

Founding Identity Engineer, Runlayer

Founding Identity Engineer at Runlayer, where the job is making sure AI agents don't do things they shouldn't, even when they've been told they can. Background in distributed, auth, and identity systems at Intel.

Vitor Balocco

Co-founder, Runlayer

Vitor Balocco is co-founder of Runlayer. Previously, Vitor was a Staff AI Engineer at Zapier and is a recognized MCP expert, speaking at international conferences on vulnerabilities and defense.

Who's Driving 260401 pdf

Thursday April 2, 2026 12:50pm - 1:15pm EDT
Marquis Ballroom (9th Floor)

Security and Operations

Session Slides Yes

2:35pm EDT

Protocol Evolution: Adapting the Model Context Protocol for SLMs and the Edge - Kierra Dotson, Further

Thursday April 2, 2026 2:35pm - 3:00pm EDT

Astor Ballroom (7th Floor)

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) was designed for robust, cloud-based LLM interactions. However, the proliferation of Small Language Models (SLMs) and their deployment on resource-constrained edge devices (e.g., IoT, mobile) introduces critical challenges to the protocol's current specification. This talk provides a deep-dive into the necessary technical adaptations for MCP to thrive at the edge. We will explore:
Context Window Optimization: Protocol-level strategies for efficient context serialization and deserialization to minimize latency and memory footprint on SLMs.
Asynchronous Context Management: How to handle intermittent connectivity and power-saving modes on edge devices through novel MCP transport and state management mechanisms.
Edge-Native Context Caching: A proposal for a lightweight, on-device context caching layer that adheres to the MCP specification while ensuring data freshness and integrity. Attendees will leave with a clear understanding of the current limitations and a roadmap for contributing to the MCP specification's evolution for the next generation of ubiquitous, context-aware edge AI.

Speakers

Kierra Dotson

Director of AI Strategy, Further

Kierra Dotson is an AI Engineer specializing in the critical intersection of AI strategy, operations (AgentOps), and governance. With a strong background in Cloud Engineering, DevOps, and Data Architecture, she focuses on building scalable, reliable, and compliant AI systems. Kierra... Read More →

Protocol Evolution Adapting MCP for SLMs and the Edge pdf

Thursday April 2, 2026 2:35pm - 3:00pm EDT
Astor Ballroom (7th Floor)

MCP Best Practices

Audience Experience Level Advanced
Session Slides Yes

2:35pm EDT

From Scopes To Intent: Reimagining Authorization for Autonomous Agents - Andres Aguiar & Abhishek Hingnikar, Okta

Thursday April 2, 2026 2:35pm - 3:00pm EDT

Empire Complex (7th Floor)

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) has standardized how we connect models to data, but the security layer remains a work in progress. Currently, MCP implements authorization via standard OAuth scopes.

While this works for handling coarse-grained tool access, it presents challenges for finer grained permissions.

To solve this, we must move toward intent-based authorization—a model where agents are authorized to perform actions based on the specific context of a task, rather than a pre-approved list of capabilities.

This presentation will dissect the consequences of the current OAuth model on agent design and present ideas of how to address them. We will discuss how to implement dynamic authorization that allows agents to be helpful without being intrusive, ensuring that security scales alongside intelligence.

Speakers

Abhishek Hingnikar

Product Architect, Okta

Andres Aguiar

Director of Product @ Okta, Okta

Solving Authorization with openfga.dev | fga.dev

MCP Dev Summit North America From Scopes To Intent pdf

Thursday April 2, 2026 2:35pm - 3:00pm EDT
Empire Complex (7th Floor)

Security and Operations

Audience Experience Level Intermediate
Session Slides Yes

3:05pm EDT

Patterns for Building MCP-powered Agent Systems - Jiquan Ngiam, MintMCP

Thursday April 2, 2026 3:05pm - 3:30pm EDT

Juilliard Complex (5th Floor)

MCPs unlock agent data access, but that's only the first step towards building agents that can work autonomously. How do we build a complete system where multiple agents work together, maintain state across sessions, and the whole thing runs reliably every day.

I use agents that work with 10+ connections daily for both personal and work use cases: health MCPs/APIs (Strava, Apple Health), productivity tools (Calendar, Linear), business systems (Attio CRM, email), and developer tools (GitHub). This talk shares effective architectural patterns that emerged from actually using this system.

We'll cover MCP composition (Virtual MCPs) and how to orchestrate multiple agents with memory. We show how state management using Git as agent memory is effective, as it provides versioning and rollback. We treat CLAUDE.md files as behavioral memory in the same system. Finally, we cover security concerns and best practices to manage agents that have access to sensitive and/or untrusted data.

Speakers

Jiquan Ngiam

Co-founder, CEO, MintMCP

Jiquan Ngiam was a senior staff researcher at Google Brain and founding team member at Coursera, where he helped build Andrew Ng's online machine learning course from the ground up. He co-authored pioneering work in multimodal deep learning at Stanford. Currently co-founder and... Read More →

Patterns for Building MCP powered Agent Systems pdf

Thursday April 2, 2026 3:05pm - 3:30pm EDT
Juilliard Complex (5th Floor)

Apps and Agents

Audience Experience Level Intermediate
Session Slides Yes

3:05pm EDT

Sponsored Session: Future-Proofing AI Agents: The Strategic Role of MCP - Don Murray, Safe Software

Thursday April 2, 2026 3:05pm - 3:30pm EDT

Marquis Ballroom (9th Floor)

Enterprises are embracing generative and agentic AI as models evolve faster than ever, creating uncertainty. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) resolves this by standardizing connections between AI and underlying services. We demonstrate how the ability to both consume and build MCP services provides the flexibility to bring all your data to any AI easily.

In order to facilitate networking and business relationships at the event, you may choose to visit a third party's booth or access sponsored content. You are never required to visit third party booths or to access sponsored content. When visiting a booth or participating in sponsored activities, the third party will receive some of your registration data. This data includes your first name, last name, title, company, address, email, standard demographics questions (i.e. job function, industry), consenting to receipt and use of such data by the third-party recipients, which will be subject to their own privacy policies.

Speakers

Don Murray

CEO, Co-Founder, Safe Software

Don Murray is a Canadian entrepreneur, co-founder and CEO of Safe Software, a company at the forefront of data integration. His entrepreneurial journey began in 1993 when Safe Software was launched, driven by a vision to enhance data integration technology

2026SafeSoftwareMCPDevFinal (1) pdf

Thursday April 2, 2026 3:05pm - 3:30pm EDT
Marquis Ballroom (9th Floor)

MCP Best Practices

Session Slides Yes

3:05pm EDT

Your #1 Docs Audience Isn't Human: Dev Ed's MCP Strategy at Apollo - Daniel Abdelsamed, Apollo GraphQL

Thursday April 2, 2026 3:05pm - 3:30pm EDT

Astor Ballroom (7th Floor)

AI agents are rapidly becoming the primary consumers of technical documentation. At Apollo GraphQL, our traffic data shows agents on pace to become our #1 traffic source, prompting a shift in how we write, structure, and serve docs. We now have two distinct audiences that read differently: AI needs patterns, not paragraphs. Connecting sentences that help humans are now wasted tokens.

As the sole documentation engineer at Apollo, I’ve spent the past year building MCP tooling for our docs. This talk covers what worked, what failed, how we tested, and what surprised us.

I’ll walk through the evolution from serving AI full pages to chunked retrieval strategies that balance completeness with token usage. You’ll see how we used AI tooling to restructure docs for AI readability and exposed them as MCP tools agents are compelled to use.

To measure progress, we built an evaluation suite: a sandboxed runner that executes end-user prompts against our MCP server, builds an application, seals the output, then passes it to a second model for scoring against a reference solution and rubric. I’ll demo this live and share how it produced stable metrics in a non-deterministic AI world.

Speakers

Daniel Abdelsamed

Staff Software Engineer, Apollo GraphQL

Daniel Abdelsamed is a Staff Software Engineer at Apollo, where he has spent the last four years architecting and scaling the company’s documentation platforms. With nearly a decade of experience in TypeScript and application design, he focuses on building durable, developer-friendly... Read More →

Dev Ed's MCP Strategy at Apollo pdf

Thursday April 2, 2026 3:05pm - 3:30pm EDT
Astor Ballroom (7th Floor)

MCP Best Practices

Audience Experience Level Intermediate
Session Slides Yes

3:35pm EDT

Declarative MCP Servers for Secure, Specialized AI Agents - Josh Reini & Reetika Roy, Snowflake

Thursday April 2, 2026 3:35pm - 4:00pm EDT

Juilliard Complex (5th Floor)

Tool sprawl is a common failure mode for enterprise agents: the more tools an agent can reach, the less predictable it becomes—driving hallucinations, higher token costs, and larger security blast radius. Scaling agents safely requires specialization enforced by capability boundaries, not just better prompts.

This talk explores MCP best practices through a managed implementation where MCP servers are declared as explicit collections of tools and treated as governed objects. Specialization comes from two independent boundaries: (1) the MCP server definition limits the tool surface an agent can even access, and (2) RBAC still applies inside that server—so a user can only invoke tools they’re authorized to use, even if they can access the server that contains them.

Together, these boundaries reduce sprawl while improving operability: agents become easier to reason about, costs drop because fewer tools are in play, and least privilege is enforced with practical, role-aligned granularity.

Speakers

Josh Reini

Developer Advocate, Snowflake

Josh is a developer advocate for Snowflake, previously at TruEra (recently acquired by Snowflake). He is also a maintainer of open-source TruLens, a library to systematically track and evaluate LLM based applications.

Josh has delivered tech talks and workshops to thousands of developers at events including PyData, Global AI Conference, NYC Dev Day, LLMs and the Generative AI Revolution, AI developer meetups including AI Camp and Unstructured SF Meetup... Read More →

Reetika Roy

Staff Software Engineer, Snowflake

Declarative MCP Servers for Secure, Specialized AI Agents.pptx pdf

Thursday April 2, 2026 3:35pm - 4:00pm EDT
Juilliard Complex (5th Floor)

Apps and Agents

Audience Experience Level Intermediate
Session Slides Yes

3:35pm EDT

Code Mode Is Best Served in the Shell - Jan Curn, Apify

Thursday April 2, 2026 3:35pm - 4:00pm EDT

Broadway Ballroom South (6th Floor)

MCP adoption is growing, but most agent integrations still treat tools as a prompt-time API, burning context tokens on tool definitions, re-copying intermediate results, and losing accuracy along the way. This improper use also leads to unfair criticism of MCP itself.

To address this problem, Cloudflare proposed MCP “code mode”: instead of prompt-time JSON tool calls, the model generates small programs that call tools via an API and run in a sandbox. This dramatically reduces overhead while improving accuracy in chained tool use. An alternative approach recently implemented by Cursor and Anthropic uses dynamic tool discovery to load only the relevant tools into context.

In this talk, we’ll introduce 𝚖𝚌𝚙𝚌 (https://github.com/apify/mcpc), a new open-source universal CLI client for MCP that brings both code mode and dynamic tool discovery to where they shine: the terminal. With persistent sessions, JSON output for scripting, and an MCP proxy for sandboxing, mcpc is an invaluable tool for AI engineers. We’ll live-demo a practical workflow that invokes multiple MCP servers in parallel, filters and transforms results locally, and then turns the interaction into reusable scripts.

Speakers

Jan Curn

Founder & CEO, Apify

Jan Curn is the founder and CEO of Apify (https://apify.com), the world's largest marketplace of web data extraction and automation tools, powering (not only) AI agents with up-to-date data. He has a lifelong passion for software engineering, which earned him an MSc and a PhD in computer... Read More →

2026 04 02 MCP Dev Summit NYC talk pdf

Thursday April 2, 2026 3:35pm - 4:00pm EDT
Broadway Ballroom South (6th Floor)

MCP Best Practices

Audience Experience Level Intermediate
Session Slides Yes

3:35pm EDT

My MCP Server Code Works, but the Agent Fails: The Case for MCP-specific Evaluations - Calum Murray & Wesley Chun, Red Hat

Thursday April 2, 2026 3:35pm - 4:00pm EDT

Marquis Ballroom (9th Floor)

You can write a perfect MCP server (clean code, typed schemas, 100% code coverage), yet agent interactions still fail. This is the probabilistic gap: your server is deterministic, but its user (the agent) is stochastic.

Standard “Agent Evals” are often the wrong tool to fix this. They judge the final outcome (was the answer good?), not the process. They struggle to provide useful insights into how the agent understands and uses your MCP server, instead focusing on providing insights into the agent itself.

In this session, we introduce mcpchecker, an open source framework for MCP server evaluations. We will show how to build integration tests specifically for the agent-MCP server interface, allowing you to isolate and debug these interactions.

Stop guessing why agents fail. Learn to test your server’s semantic interface and prove that agents can actually understand it.

Speakers

Calum Murray

Software Engineer, Red Hat

I am a Software Engineer at Red Hat, where I work on Applied AI projects with a focus on MCP and Agents. I also work on Serverless with the Knative community.

I am a CNCF ambassador, where I present about new and exciting technologies in the AI/Serverless as well as mentor new contributors... Read More →

Wesley Chun

Technical Program Manager - AI, Red Hat

WESLEY CHUN, MSCS, is a Google Developer Expert (GDE) in Google Cloud (GCP) & Google Workspace (GWS), author of Prentice Hall's bestselling "Core Python" series (corepython.com), co-author of "Python Web Development with Django", and has written for Linux Journal & CNET. He's currently... Read More →

mcpchecker mcpdevsummit pdf

Thursday April 2, 2026 3:35pm - 4:00pm EDT
Marquis Ballroom (9th Floor)

MCP Best Practices

Audience Experience Level Intermediate
Session Slides Yes

3:35pm EDT

OCI Images as MCP Packaging: Supply Chain Security for AI Tools - Juan Antonio Osorio, Stacklok

Thursday April 2, 2026 3:35pm - 4:00pm EDT

Astor Ballroom (7th Floor)

So you found an MCP server on npm that does exactly what you need. You run npx and... now what? One reason people skip security verification for MCP servers is that it's genuinely hard to know what you're actually running. The package works, so why question it?

Here's the thing: MCP servers are getting access to your files, your APIs, your credentials. We should probably know what's in them before we hand over the keys.

In this talk, we'll dig into using OCI containers as the packaging standard for MCP servers - not because containers are trendy, but because they unlock supply chain security constructs that npm and PyPI simply don't have. We'll walk through building repackaging pipelines that verify source packages, run MCP-specific security scans, and produce attestations with Sigstore. Real pipelines, real commands, real output.

Note that this won't solve every trust problem - but it gets us a lot closer to "I know what I'm running" than the current state of affairs.

Speakers

Juan A. Osorio

Principal Engineer, Stacklok

Juan Antonio "Ozz" Osorio is a Mexican software engineer living in Finland. His background spans security for OpenStack, Kubernetes, and bare metal environments. Currently at Stacklok, he founded the ToolHive project and has been building MCP infrastructure, including supply chain... Read More →

Presentation OCI Images pdf

Thursday April 2, 2026 3:35pm - 4:00pm EDT
Astor Ballroom (7th Floor)

MCP Best Practices

Audience Experience Level Intermediate
Session Slides Yes

3:35pm EDT

Clients? Servers? Agents? The Beautiful Asymmetry of the MCP Spec - Rohit Ganguly, Descope

Thursday April 2, 2026 3:35pm - 4:00pm EDT

Broadway Ballroom North (6th Floor)

Since its inception, we've talked about MCP from the perspective of Clients and Servers. This session focuses on an interesting paradigm taking advantage of the intentional asymmetry of the MCP spec - what if a Client was also a Server? What happens when we break out of a singular client-server pair and into multiple? What can this idea tell us about the future of MCP?

This session will cover the concept of an "MCP Agent" - a Client that is also a Server. We'll construct a system design for this MCP Agent to other servers and MCP agents and touch on several key considerations including auth and scalability.

Participants are expected to have an introductory knowledge of MCP, the mechanics of how Clients and Servers interact with each other, and a general interest in agent-to-agent communication!

Speakers

Rohit Ganguly

AI Product Manager, Descope

Rohit is an AI Product Manager at Descope, where he leads the MCP Auth and Agentic Identity efforts. Previously, he worked in Microsoft's Developer Division across products like the Azure SDKs and VS Code before launching the Azure MCP Server.

Clients Servers Agents pdf

Thursday April 2, 2026 3:35pm - 4:00pm EDT
Broadway Ballroom North (6th Floor)

Protocol in Depth

Audience Experience Level Intermediate
Session Slides Yes

3:35pm EDT

Shadow MCP: Finding the MCPs Nobody Approved - Aidan Sochowski & Alexander Frazer, Runlayer

Thursday April 2, 2026 3:35pm - 4:00pm EDT

Empire Complex (7th Floor)

Shadow IT is back - but this time it's AI-powered. Employees are configuring MCP servers directly in Cursor, Claude Desktop, and VS Code, creating a blind spot that traditional security tools miss. These shadow MCPs operate outside centralized control, enabling data exfiltration, supply chain attacks, and compliance violations.

This talk exposes the shadow MCP problem and presents a comprehensive detection and response framework:

- Why shadow MCPs are uniquely dangerous (AI amplifies access, automates actions, no audit trail)
- Discovery techniques: IDE config scanning, MDM integration, network detection patterns
- Classification: distinguishing managed vs shadow servers across device fleets
- Response playbooks: triage, investigation, remediation by risk level

I'll share real vulnerability examples from official MCPs (GitHub, Asana, Supabase, Postmark) and demonstrate automated detection through IDE hooks (Cursor, Claude Code) and MDM platforms (SimpleMDM, Jamf).

Attendees will leave with practical techniques for gaining visibility into shadow MCP usage and a framework for bringing unauthorized integrations under organizational control.

Speakers

Aidan Sochowski

Senior Product Engineer, Runlayer

Aidan is a founding product engineer at Runlayer. Previously he's worked
at Glean on scalable connector and crawler infrastructure and at YouTube
on recommendations serving infrastructure

... Read More →

Alexander Frazer

Founding Security Engineer, Runlayer

Alexander Frazer is a Founding Security Engineer at Runlayer, specializing in generative AI and cybersecurity. With 15+ years of experience, he focuses on AI security challenges and MCP implementations. Previously he has led creation and evaluation of AI-driven security triage systems... Read More →

Shadow AI MCP Dev Summit pdf

Shadow AI MCP Dev Summit pptx

Thursday April 2, 2026 3:35pm - 4:00pm EDT
Empire Complex (7th Floor)

Security and Operations

Audience Experience Level Intermediate
Session Slides Yes

4:30pm EDT

When MCP Isn’t Enough: Product Decisions Behind Scalable Agent Systems - Cansu Berkem, Datadog

Thursday April 2, 2026 4:30pm - 4:55pm EDT

Juilliard Complex (5th Floor)

MCP is a strong foundation for building AI agents, enabling fast iteration, clear boundaries, and safer early deployments. But as agents move from prototypes to products customers rely on, product teams begin to hit limits around reliability, user experience, observability, and long-running workflows.

In this talk, I’ll share a product leader’s perspective on how MCP-based agent systems evolve in production. We’ll explore the product signals that indicate when MCP-only approaches start to constrain outcomes, and how teams can extend MCP-driven systems to meet higher expectations around trust, clarity, and control. Attendees will leave with a practical framework for scaling MCP-based agents from experimentation to dependable products.

Speakers

Cansu Berkem

Director of Product Management, Datadog

Cansu Berkem is a Director of Product Management at Datadog, leading AI and Service Management platforms, and the product leader behind Bits AI, a generative AI copilot focused on building trusted, agentic AI systems in production. She has 15+ years of experience building AI, data... Read More →

From MCP Prototypes to Production Agents What actually matters (2) pdf

Thursday April 2, 2026 4:30pm - 4:55pm EDT
Juilliard Complex (5th Floor)

Apps and Agents

Audience Experience Level Beginner
Session Slides Yes

4:30pm EDT

Bridging Kernel Space and AI: Building an MCP Server for Linux Scheduler Observability - Daniel Hodges, Meta

Thursday April 2, 2026 4:30pm - 4:55pm EDT

Astor Ballroom (7th Floor)

The Model Context Protocol enables AI assistants to interface with external tools and data sources, but most examples focus on high-level APIs and databases. This talk explores building a production MCP server that exposes low-level Linux kernel observability data to AI assistants, enabling natural language debugging of complex systems.

`scxtop` is an observability tool for Linux's new sched_ext extensible scheduler framework (https://github.com/sched-ext/scx/tree/main/tools/scxtop). By implementing MCP, it allows developers to ask questions like "Why is my application experiencing high scheduling latency?" and receive AI-driven analysis that correlates kernel tracing data, hardware topology, performance counters, and scheduler internals.

Speakers

Daniel Hodges

Software Engineer, Meta

Daniel Hodges is a software engineer on the Linux team at Meta. He has previous worked in areas such a observability, profiling, and application performance testing.

Copy of Bridging Kernel Space and AI Building an MCP Server for Linux Scheduler Observability pdf

Thursday April 2, 2026 4:30pm - 4:55pm EDT
Astor Ballroom (7th Floor)

MCP Best Practices

Audience Experience Level Advanced
Session Slides Yes

4:30pm EDT

If You Can Secure It Here, You Can Secure It Anywhere - Milan Williams & Katrina Liu, Semgrep

Thursday April 2, 2026 4:30pm - 4:55pm EDT

Empire Complex (7th Floor)

Here's the thing about being a security company: you can't ship a vulnerable MCP server. For us, getting pwned isn’t just embarrassing - it gets us on the front page of Hacker News. Our customers trust us to protect them from nation-state attackers, well-funded adversaries (and the odd teenager attacking for lolz.)

At the same time, the MCP ecosystem is still maturing. Hardening standards for sophisticated attackers don't exist yet. And with high-profile supply chain attacks now targeting agents, attackers are actively exploiting the trust developers place in their toolchains. Last year, a flaw in mcp-remote turned into a remote code execution nightmare, exposing over 400,000 developers. That's the reality we're building in.

When it came to our MCP server, we built it using the same rigor we use to protect the world's largest companies. This talk covers the threat model we designed against, gaps in MCP's current design that required workarounds, and ultimately how we built an MCP server trusted by enterprise customers, and hardened against even the most novel attacks. If we can secure it here, you can secure it anywhere.

Speakers

Milan Williams

Senior Product Manager, Semgrep

I build security products. I'm a Senior Product Manager at Semgrep, a high-growth cybersecurity startup. I lead the teams responsible for Semgrep Code (SAST) and Secrets detection products.

I recently graduated from Harvard University with degrees in Computer Science and Physics. In my free time, you can find me geeking about the latest in security / developer tooling, running in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, or enjoying local theater... Read More →

Katrina Liu

Software Engineer, Semgrep

Katrina is a software engineer at Semgrep. She is on the Semgrep Analysis Foundations Team, the team that owns and maintains the core static analysis functionality of the Semgrep tool. She is currently working on Semgrep's MCP server.

MCPDevSummit Semgrep, Katrina & Milan (1) pptx

Thursday April 2, 2026 4:30pm - 4:55pm EDT
Empire Complex (7th Floor)

Security and Operations

Audience Experience Level Intermediate
Session Slides Yes

5:00pm EDT

Combine Skills and MCP To Close the Context Gap - Pedro Rodrigues, Supabase

Thursday April 2, 2026 5:00pm - 5:25pm EDT

Broadway Ballroom South (6th Floor)

As AI agents become more capable, their biggest limitation is no longer reasoning — it’s context. Without access to procedural knowledge and domain-specific understanding, agents struggle to perform real work reliably. In this talk, we’ll explore how Skills address this gap by giving agents on-demand access to company-, team-, and user-specific context.

We’ll look at how Skills can be combined with MCP servers to build safer, more reliable agents, and walk through a real-world example of managing a Postgres database. Using evals, we’ll compare agent performance with and without Postgres-specific Skills, showing how MCP enables secure database access while dramatically improving outcomes.

Speakers

Pedro Rodrigues

AI Tooling Engineer, Supabase

I’m an AI Tooling Engineer at Supabase, part of the team maintaining all AI initiatives including our MCP server, AI assistant, and Skills. I’ve been involved with the MCP protocol since its early days, contributing to its SDKs and projects like Skybridge. I’ve spoken at MCP... Read More →

presentation pdf

Thursday April 2, 2026 5:00pm - 5:25pm EDT
Broadway Ballroom South (6th Floor)

MCP Best Practices

Audience Experience Level Intermediate
Session Slides Yes

5:00pm EDT

MCP Meets Java: Engineering the MCP Java SDK - Dariusz Jędrzejczyk, Broadcom

Thursday April 2, 2026 5:00pm - 5:25pm EDT

Astor Ballroom (7th Floor)

Implementing the Model Context Protocol (MCP) in Java poses a challenge: mapping a fast-evolving specification onto a language that favors strict type safety and stability. This session explores the evolution of the official MCP Java SDK, moving beyond naive implementation to address the "hectic" reality of a shifting protocol while providing an enterprise-grade AI enabler.

We’ll discuss the transition from early bidirectional transports to recent Streamable HTTP with sessions and stateless patterns. You’ll learn how Java’s type system led to a "correct-by-construction" approach, ensuring invalid states are unrepresentable, rather than just throwing runtime errors. We will cover Java-specific security considerations, including pluggable authorization hooks designed for a fragmented security ecosystem.

Finally, we’ll share lessons on balancing abstraction with pragmatism: how we decoupled JSON serialization for pluggability and managed the friction between Java’s synchronous heritage and MCP’s asynchronous nature. Whether you're building AI-enabled apps or designing cross-language SDKs, this talk provides a blueprint for robust MCP adoption.

Speakers

Dariusz Jędrzejczyk

Principal Software Engineer, Broadcom

Member of the Spring Team. MCP Java SDK maintainer. Maintainer of Project Reactor. Contributes to Spring portfolio projects. Passionate about developer productivity, distributed systems, concurrency, system design, and networking. Dariusz has commercial experience in Platform Engineering... Read More →

MCP Meets Java key

Thursday April 2, 2026 5:00pm - 5:25pm EDT
Astor Ballroom (7th Floor)

MCP Best Practices

Audience Experience Level Any
Session Slides Yes

5:00pm EDT

Building a Workflow Engine on MCP: Orchestrating Processes With Tasks - Donnie Adams, Obot AI

Thursday April 2, 2026 5:00pm - 5:25pm EDT

Broadway Ballroom North (6th Floor)

What if your workflow engine wasn't just a consumer of MCP servers, but was itself built entirely on the MCP protocol? This talk explores a novel architecture that uses MCP's newest primitives to create a production-ready workflow orchestration system.
We'll demonstrate how MCP's task framework provides natural workflow step management, while sampling enables intelligent decision-making at each stage. You'll see how dynamic tool definition works at both workflow and step levels, allowing workflows to adapt their capabilities on the fly. We'll also cover practical challenges like handling OAuth authentication flows mid-execution and coordinating multiple MCP servers within a single workflow.
Through a real-world case study you'll see how MCP's composability transforms workflow design. Rather than building yet another workflow engine that happens to use MCP tools, we'll show how treating MCP as the foundation protocol unlocks new patterns for distributed, intelligent automation.
Attendees will leave with a deeper understanding of the MCP specification and how the capabilities can be composed to create production-ready workflow applications.

Speakers

Donnie Adams

Software Architect, Obot AI

Donnie Adams is a Software Architect at Obot AI, where he builds enterprise MCP infrastructure including the Obot MCP Gateway and agent orchestration systems. His work focuses on MCP gateway architecture, OAuth integration, and distributed AI systems. He specializes in building production-grade... Read More →

2026MCPDevSummitNYC pdf

Thursday April 2, 2026 5:00pm - 5:25pm EDT
Broadway Ballroom North (6th Floor)

Protocol in Depth

Audience Experience Level Intermediate
Session Slides Yes

5:00pm EDT

Towards Building Safe & Secure Agentic AI - Dawn Song, UC Berkeley; UC Berkeley Center for Responsible Decentralized Intelligence & Matt White, Linux Foundation/PyTorch Foundation

Thursday April 2, 2026 5:00pm - 5:25pm EDT

Empire Complex (7th Floor)

Recent advancements in agentic AI have unlocked powerful new capabilities, however, they also introduce fundamentally new security risks. In this talk, I present a system-level view of the security landscape of agentic AI, drawing on a comprehensive systematization of attacks and defenses across modern agent architectures.

I show how increasing agent flexibility along different dimensions expands attack surfaces and enables threats such as prompt injection, memory poisoning, unsafe data flows, credential leakage, and unauthorized execution. Using real-world incidents and CVE analyses, I illustrate how agents can be manipulated through external content, compromised tools, or poisoned internal components.

The talk also provides a systematic overview of end-to-end automatic red teaming and risk assessment for agentic AI systems as well as a defense-in-depth framework for building secure agentic systems, spanning runtime guardrails, access control, information-flow tracking, privilege separation, and secure-by-design architectures, helping practitioners assess risk, close security gaps, and deploy agents safely at scale.

Speakers

Dawn Song

Professor, Computer Science @ UC Berkeley and Director of Berkeley RDI (Berkeley Center for Responsible Decentralized Intelligence), UC Berkeley; UC Berkeley Center for Responsible Decentralized Intelligence

Dawn Song is a UC Berkeley CS Professor & Berkeley RDI Co-Director. She is the recipient of the MacArthur, Guggenheim, ACM, IEEE, and Sloan Fellowship, Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Senior Fellowship, NSF CAREER Award, MIT Technology Review TR-35 Award, ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Innovation... Read More →

Matt White

Global CTO of AI, Linux Foundation

Matt White is the Executive Director of the PyTorch Foundation and GM of AI at the Linux Foundation. He is also the Director of the Generative AI Commons. Matt has nearly 30 years of experience in applied research and standards in AI and data in telecom, media and gaming industries... Read More →

Towards Building Safe and Secure Agentic AI (25 mins) pdf

Thursday April 2, 2026 5:00pm - 5:25pm EDT
Empire Complex (7th Floor)

Security and Operations

Audience Experience Level Any
Session Slides Yes

5:30pm EDT

Operating MCP in the Enterprise: From Protocol To Production - Amar Deep Singh, GM Financial & Neelabh Tripathi, Cisco Systems

Thursday April 2, 2026 5:30pm - 5:55pm EDT

Juilliard Complex (5th Floor)

Model Context Protocol (MCP) enables standardized AI agents, but real adoption depends on how MCP servers operate in production—not just how the protocol is defined.

This session provides a high-level, practitioner perspective on running MCP in enterprise environments. It covers how MCP servers fit into existing platforms, with a focus on observability, security, distributed tracking of agent behavior, and resiliency. Rather than diving deep into implementation details, the talk shares lessons learned from real deployments and common pitfalls teams face when moving MCP from experimentation to production.

Speakers

Amar Deep Singh

AVP IT Architecture (Head of Enterprise Reusable Services & Tech Standards)), GM Financial

Amar Deep Singh is a distinguished software architect and author with extensive experience in microservices and cloud computing. He is the author of "Building and Delivering Microservices on AWS," a comprehensive guide that explores software architecture patterns and the deployment... Read More →

Neelabh Tripathi

Engineering Architect, Cisco Systems

Neelabh Tripathi is a seasoned IT professional with over 18 years of expertise in cloud computing, enterprise architecture, and microservices. He has worked with some of the world’s leading organizations, where he played pivotal roles in driving digital transformation and innov... Read More →

Operating MCP in the Enterprise pdf

Thursday April 2, 2026 5:30pm - 5:55pm EDT
Juilliard Complex (5th Floor)

Apps and Agents

Audience Experience Level Intermediate
Session Slides Yes

5:30pm EDT

Rules Are Not Suggestions: A History of MCP Non-Compliance - Sterling Dreyer, Arcade.dev

Thursday April 2, 2026 5:30pm - 5:55pm EDT

Astor Ballroom (7th Floor)

Less than 20% of remote MCP servers fully comply with the MCP Specification.
MCP adoption took off quickly, but full compliance didn't follow at the same pace. Today, partial implementations are common across both clients and servers, and the reasons go beyond just a fast-moving spec.
In this session, we'll walk you through:
-The first version of the MCP Specification and what it was designed for
-How MCP evolved to keep up with the quickly evolving AI ecosystem
-How clients and servers deviate from the spec and why developers choose not to comply
-What we can do to shrink the gap between design and implementation
This isn't a story about bad developers or tight deadlines. It's about how bending the rules has become part of how agents get built.

Speakers

Sterling Dreyer

Founding Engineer, Arcade.dev

Sterling is a founding engineer at Arcade.dev, focused on backend and infrastructure. Before Arcade, he was the second engineer at Featureform, a feature store platform acquired by Redis.

Rules Are Not Suggestions v3 pdf

Thursday April 2, 2026 5:30pm - 5:55pm EDT
Astor Ballroom (7th Floor)

MCP Best Practices

Audience Experience Level Any
Session Slides Yes

5:30pm EDT

URL Elicitation Deep Dive: Third-party OAuth Solved (and More!) - Nate Barbettini, Arcade.dev

Thursday April 2, 2026 5:30pm - 5:55pm EDT

Broadway Ballroom North (6th Floor)

The Nov 2025 release of MCP introduced a new client capability: URL Elicitation. This capability is game-changing for MCP servers that interact with external systems. But don't just take our word for it... Hear it straight from the author of the spec!

In this talk, Nate (lead author of URL Elicitation) will break down the "what" and "why" of this new addition to the protocol. You'll learn about:
- Why it's a mistake to reuse or "pass through" OAuth tokens from one server to another
- The confused deputy problem and other common pitfalls to watch out for
- How URL Elicitation unlocks a secure way for MCP servers to call external services that use OAuth or API keys, require payments, or gather sensitive information
- The correct security patterns for any remote MCP server project today

No need to be a security expert to attend! Nate will break down the problems and solutions in clear, relatable language, and provide crucial guidance for anyone building MCP servers in 2026 and beyond.

Speakers

Nate Barbettini

Founding Engineer, Arcade.dev

Nate Barbettini is a leading voice in security and AI. At Arcade.dev, he's building the MCP runtime that helps enterprises deploy multi-user AI agents that take actions across any system. As an active MCP contributor, Nate is focused on security-critical work, authoring URL Elicitation... Read More →

URL Elicitation MCP Dev Summit 2026 pdf

Thursday April 2, 2026 5:30pm - 5:55pm EDT
Broadway Ballroom North (6th Floor)

Protocol in Depth

Audience Experience Level Intermediate
Session Slides Yes

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