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


Type: MCP Best Practices clear filter
Thursday, April 2
 

11:50am EDT

MCP at 18 Months: Protocols, Patterns, and What We Didn't See Coming - Shaun Smith, Hugging Face
Thursday April 2, 2026 11:50am - 12:15pm EDT
MCP launched a revolution in peoples expectations of what Generative AI could achieve. Since then, MCP has been supplemented by other protocols, techniques and extensions.

At Hugging Face we have 1000s of AI Applications deployed, using MCP for interconnectivity, as well as supporting Remote MCP via Inference Providers.

This experience based session explores how inference, compute and storage workloads are shifting in an agentic world, and how MCP supports us in a rapidly changing environment.

We will:
- Contrast how ACP and Open Responses work within our MCP infrastructure and our experience deploying them.
- Explore how Skills, and Code Generation fit, the impact future models will have on the landscape - and why things that may seem obvious in hindsight weren't.
- Discuss the value of multi-model environments and how subagent patterns are critical for certain tasks.
- Report on the trends we see in shifting Agentic and Inference workloads, and MCPs continued role in supporting them
- Examine our unique multimodal demands - and what needs we and our community have to support mixed content.
Speakers
avatar for Shaun Smith

Shaun Smith

Open Source MCP and Agents, Hugging Face
Shaun Smith leads Open Source MCP at Hugging Face, and is an MCP Steering Committee member serving as a Community Moderator and within the Transports Working Group.

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

11:50am EDT

MCP Gateways: The Control Plane for Agentic Integration - Alex Salazar, Arcade.dev
Thursday April 2, 2026 11:50am - 12:15pm EDT
As MCP deployments grow beyond a few tools, the failure mode isn’t the model—it’s the integration surface. Teams quickly accumulate many MCP servers, inconsistent authentication, duplicated “almost-the-same” tools, and no single place to apply policy, observe behavior, or onboard agents and new systems.

This talk introduces the MCP Gateway pattern: a single MCP entrypoint that federates multiple servers into curated tool surfaces for each agent, workflow, or IDE. Borrowing lessons from the API boom, we’ll show how to structure capabilities into layered building blocks—system access, reusable orchestration, and channel-specific experiences—so you avoid point-to-point spaghetti while keeping integrations composable.

You’ll see a reference architecture that separates front-door caller identity from downstream tool authorization (scoped OAuth or API keys), supports tool allowlists and LLM-facing usage guidance, and adds the controls teams need: routing, versioning, rate limits, audit logs, and end-to-end tracing. You’ll leave with a practical checklist for turning tool sprawl into a governed integration platform that stays interoperable as new agents, clients, and systems arrive.
Speakers
avatar for Alex Salazar

Alex Salazar

Co-Founder/CEO, Arcade.dev
Alex Salazar is the Co-Founder and CEO of Arcade.dev, the runtime for MCP that enables AI agents to securely take real actions across enterprise systems. He's solving the hardest problems standing between AI agent demos and production deployment: secure agent authorization, high-accuracy... Read More →
Thursday April 2, 2026 11:50am - 12:15pm EDT
Astor Ballroom (7th Floor)
  MCP Best Practices

12:20pm EDT

Dynamic MCPs: Agentic Discovery, Configuration, and Management of MCP Workloads - Jim Clark, Docker
Thursday April 2, 2026 12:20pm - 12:45pm EDT
With the rapid expansion of available MCP servers, we need ways to manage our MCP workloads dynamically. Agents can help us configure agents! This talk explores a set of _primordial_ MCP tools that enable agents to discover, configure, and activate MCP servers at runtime. Rather than focusing on deferred tool loading or context reduction, we examine how agents can discover relevant servers from community registries or private catalogs, elicit configuration from users, and activate tools in the current session. We also examine the use of elicitation URLs as a key building block for constructing portable, reusable MCP configurations.
Speakers
avatar for Jim Clark

Jim Clark

Principal Engineer, Docker
Physics dropout turned software engineer now working on AI Tools and security team at Docker. Spent 25 years building developer tools, including co-founding Atomist (acquired by Docker in 2022). Now containerizing AI agents so they play nicely with humans. Regular conference speaker... Read More →
Thursday April 2, 2026 12:20pm - 12:45pm EDT
Broadway Ballroom South (6th Floor)
  MCP Best Practices
  • Audience Experience Level Any

12:20pm EDT

MCP: The Gateway to Real-Time Human–AI Collaboration in Jupyter at Scale - Jake Diamond-Reivich, Project Jupyter
Thursday April 2, 2026 12:20pm - 12:45pm EDT
Additional Authors/Contributors:
  • Andrey Velichkevich – Kubeflow Steering Committee
  • Zach Sailer - Jupyter Executive Council


Jupyter Notebooks are critical medium for code, data, and ML, demanding a paradigm shift for AI assistance. With Jupyter's real-time collaboration and cloud-native evolution, it's becoming a powerful portal to a full data platform, beyond mere notebooks.

This session explores MCP as the essential framework for human-AI synergy within this expanded Jupyter ecosystem. Leveraging Jupyter's extensibility, MCP expands its API, opening gateways to services across the entire data, ML, and AI landscape. By extending Jupyter’s real-time collaborative models, MCP enables AI agents to seamlessly co-create alongside human developers. This integration moves beyond traditional AI coding assistance, fostering true parallel work without conflicting edits, eliminating friction and accelerating development.

The speakers will give the live demo showing how MCP provides the blueprint for connecting AI assistance directly with the Jupyter environment, both locally and in the cloud. This empowers builders to redefine human-AI interaction and unlock unprecedented productivity across the entire AI development lifecycle – from data preparation and feature engineering to LLMs fine-tuning and evaluations.
Thursday April 2, 2026 12:20pm - 12:45pm EDT
Astor Ballroom (7th Floor)

12:20pm EDT

Sponsored Session: Model Context Pragmatism - Jeremiah Lowin, Prefect
Thursday April 2, 2026 12:20pm - 12:45pm EDT
MCP is poised to be the connective tissue between large‑language models and the data they need. Despite this, many teams still stall at the prototype stage. This talk distills what actually works in production, what still breaks, and why.

I’ll share some lessons building FastMCP, the framework used to build 70% of MCP servers across all languages. We’ll look at the real environments where MCP is thriving, the hurdles teams hit when they move to productize it. Finally, we’ll share a view of the road ahead as context becomes a first‑class product surface.



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
avatar for Jeremiah Lowin

Jeremiah Lowin

Founder, CEO, Prefect
Jeremiah Lowin is the Founder and CEO of Prefect and the creator of FastMCP, which has become the standard framework for building with the Model Context Protocol. A founding PMC member of Apache Airflow, Jeremiah has spent over a decade at the intersection of data engineering and... Read More →
Thursday April 2, 2026 12:20pm - 12:45pm EDT
Marquis Ballroom (9th Floor)

12:50pm EDT

Building ChatGPT Apps: Principles for a New Kind of Interface - Elliot Garreffa, Ghost Team
Thursday April 2, 2026 12:50pm - 1:15pm EDT
ChatGPT apps aren't websites or mobile apps. They're a new primitive - lightweight tools invoked within a conversation, surfacing minimal UI to move the user forward.

Websites are destinations. Mobile apps are rich installed experiences with device access. ChatGPT apps are in-flow utilities - joining tasks already in progress. You don't own the screen or control the journey. The model decides when to invoke you.

Wrong mental model = wrong architecture.

Drawing on first-hand experience shipping ChatGPT apps for enterprise clients, we'll cover the principles separating apps that work from those that don't:

- Scoping around single, sharp intent vs building a platform inside a chat
- Where conversational interfaces add genuine value - and where you're fighting the medium
- Leveraging context and memory instead of requiring users to re-establish state
- Using ChatGPT as infrastructure vs distribution
- Testing and iterating when the model controls invocation

We'll walk through concrete implementation examples and lessons learned.
Speakers
avatar for Elliot Garreffa

Elliot Garreffa

Co-founder, Ghost Team
Elliot Garreffa is Co-founder and Head of Growth at Ghost Team, an AI-development studio building AI agents, MCP-Apps and ChatGPT Apps for enterprise B2B SaaS clients. Through his company Ghost Team he has pioneered production-grade MCP implementations for enterprise clients & built... Read More →
Thursday April 2, 2026 12:50pm - 1:15pm EDT
Broadway Ballroom South (6th Floor)
  MCP Best Practices, Apps and Agents

12:50pm EDT

CANCELLED - Scaling Agentic AI on Cloud: MCP Best Practices for Large Enterprises - Ankit Haseeja, JPMC
Thursday April 2, 2026 12:50pm - 1:15pm EDT
How MCP Can Be Used to Build Scalable, Secure, Cloud-Native Agentic Systems on AWS, Azure, and GCP

As enterprises adopt agentic AI, the need for scalable, secure, cloud-native architectures becomes critical. This session explores how the Model Context Protocol (MCP) enables agents to reliably connect with cloud services across AWS, Azure, and GCP using a unified, open standard. Attendees will learn architecture patterns for deploying agents on serverless runtimes and container platforms, strategies for scaling multi-agent workflows, and methods to enforce enterprise-grade security using IAM, secret management, VPC networking, and policy controls. The talk also covers best practices for integrating MCP agents with databases, storage, monitoring, and enterprise APIs, along with techniques for cost optimization and observability. By the end, participants will understand how MCP simplifies interoperability and provides a foundation for building robust, production-ready agentic systems across multi-cloud environments.
Thursday April 2, 2026 12:50pm - 1:15pm EDT
Astor Ballroom (7th Floor)
  MCP Best Practices

2:35pm EDT

Mental Reset: How To Rethink Your User Flow in the Age of MCP & ChatGPT Apps - Erica Beavers, Alpic
Thursday April 2, 2026 2:35pm - 3:00pm EDT
Remember when the mobile app stores launched? The first wave of apps were glorified websites, until someone made you tilt your phone to "drink" a virtual beer. That novelty unlocked the iPhone's true potential: apps that felt native to the device. Today, we're at a similar inflection point with ChatGPT Apps and MCP integrations.

After building dozens of AI-powered applications, we’ve identified some interaction patterns that truly shine and those that fall flat.

This talk explores what makes ChatGPT (& MCP) apps fundamentally different from traditional software.

We'll examine novel use cases like adaptive gaming where models seamlessly adopt complex roles, analytics tools that merge interactive visualizations with conversational insights, and SaaS integrations that surface the right features at the right time.

You’ll learn how to design for this new paradigm: what to expose, how users move through AI-native workflows, and what doesn’t work. Your product now lives inside the highest-distribution AI platform. The real question isn’t whether to build for it, but how to make apps that feel truly revolutionary.
Speakers
avatar for Erica Beavers

Erica Beavers

Cofounder, Alpic
Co-founder of Alpic, seasoned infrastructure builders with deep experience in distributed systems, serverless architecture, and developer platforms. Previously, built Streamroot, a video delivery startup acquired by a major US telco, and now focused on making agent-native apps easy... Read More →
Thursday April 2, 2026 2:35pm - 3:00pm EDT
Broadway Ballroom South (6th Floor)
  MCP Best Practices

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
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
avatar for Kierra Dotson

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 →
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

Sponsored Session: Agents and MCP @ Google Scale - Alan Blount & Vaibhav Katkade, Google Cloud
Thursday April 2, 2026 2:35pm - 3:00pm EDT
Build, scale, govern, and optimize your agents using Google's ecosystem alongside the Model Context Protocol (MCP). This session will zoom through the complete agent lifecycle. We will vibe-code ADK agents with AntiGravity and it will use skills to access WebMCP. We will then tackle infrastructure, showing you how to effectively scale your usage with remote MCP servers, Google Cloud hosting, and decompose into multi-agent systems with A2A. Finally, we will cover critical governance strategies, highlighting how to manage your MCPs, agents, and API tools securely using Apigee or an OSS stack featuring an MCP-enhanced Envoy proxy.
Speakers
avatar for Vaibhav Katkade

Vaibhav Katkade

Senior Product Manager, Google Cloud
Vaibhav has spent 15+ years working with Fortune 100 enterprises working on zero-trust enterprise security solutions across enterprise on-premise and cloud networks. Most recently at Google, he has been working on products and solutions to secure and govern MCP and agentic worklo... Read More →
avatar for Alan Blount

Alan Blount

Senior Product Manager, Google
Alan Blount (he/him) is a Sr. Product Manager for the Agent Platform at Google Cloud Vertex AI. A 20 year software engineer turned PM, he empowers developers to build trustworthy, state-of-the-art Gen AI agents. His focus spans the alphabet soup of agentic tech: ADK, A2A, MCP, A2UI... Read More →
Thursday April 2, 2026 2:35pm - 3:00pm EDT
Marquis Ballroom (9th Floor)

3:05pm EDT

Skills Vs. MCP Vs. Code Mode: Cutting Through the Hype (and the Rage) - Nikolay Rodionov, Alpic
Thursday April 2, 2026 3:05pm - 3:30pm EDT
The AI agent ecosystem is fragmenting into competing paradigms, each promising to be the future of how AI systems interact with the world. Skills are simple markdown local workflows using scripts, MCP provides structured tool access across platforms, and Code Mode solves Context bloat problems by executing MCP Tools as code. Most people think these are competing paradigms. They are not.

This talk cuts through the hype and developer frustration to examine what these approaches actually enable, how they overlap, and how do they complete each other.

**Key Learnings**

- Clear mental model explaining the concepts behind Skills, MCP, and Code Mode: what each actually does vs. marketing claims
- How these paradigms complement rather than compete: practical patterns for combining them (Skills in MCP Servers!)
- Decision framework: when to reach for each approach based on your use case, and a map of in which MCP Client each concept is already implemented
- Where the ecosystem is heading and how to future-proof your architectural choices
Speakers
avatar for Nikolay Rodionov

Nikolay Rodionov

Co-founder and COO, Alpic
Nikolay Rodionov is a cofounder and COO at Alpic, an AI infrastructure startup for MCP, and creator of Skybridge, an open-source framework to build MCP Apps. He previously founded Streamroot, a P2P video delivery technology that powered multiple Super Bowl streaming events before... Read More →
Thursday April 2, 2026 3:05pm - 3:30pm EDT
Broadway Ballroom South (6th Floor)
  MCP Best Practices

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
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
avatar for Don Murray

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
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
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
avatar for Daniel Abdelsamed

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

3:35pm EDT

Code Mode Is Best Served in the Shell - Jan Curn, Apify
Thursday April 2, 2026 3:35pm - 4:00pm EDT
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
avatar for Jan Curn

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

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
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
avatar for Calum Murray

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 →
avatar for Wesley Chun

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

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
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
avatar for Juan A. Osorio

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

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
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
avatar for Daniel Hodges

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.
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

CANCELLED - Safer AI Integration Using Mock MCP Servers for Your 3rd-Party APIs - Kin Lane, Naftiko
Thursday April 2, 2026 4:30pm - 4:55pm EDT
Developing MCP servers against the APIs you depend on can feel risky, especially when those servers interact with real-world data in production services. When integrating AI into the enterprise, you're often better off starting in a sandbox, but not all 3rd-party APIs offer sandboxes, let alone MCP-compatible ones. No problem: OpenAPI, Microcks, and Bruno are here to help.


At Naftiko, we've been delivering HTTP and MCP sandboxes for common 3rd-party APIs like GitHub, Jira, Notion, and Figma. Our approach uses OpenAPI specifications published to GitHub, open-source Microcks to deliver mock REST APIs and MCP servers, and Bruno as an HTTP client to explore the sandbox. We'll share how we design OpenAPI specs with use-case-driven, business-aligned examples that can be easily forked and mocked on-premise using Microcks, providing a safer development approach for anyone building with MCP and integrating it into LLMs, copilots, and agentic automation.

Join us for a hands-on, practical journey through how OpenAPI, Microcks, GitHub, and Bruno can help you reduce the risk of AI integration with 3rd-party, and internal APIs.
Thursday April 2, 2026 4:30pm - 4:55pm EDT
Marquis Ballroom (9th Floor)
  MCP Best Practices

4:30pm EDT

Schema To Insight: Architecting Production-Grade Database MCP Tools - Kurtis Van Gent & Wenxin Du, Google
Thursday April 2, 2026 4:30pm - 4:55pm EDT
Connecting an LLM to a database is the "Hello World" of agentic AI, but scaling that to production requires solving complex problems in security, context management, and reliability. You can't simply feed a 500-table schema into a context window and hope for the best.
In this session, the creators of the MCP Toolbox for Databases (12.5k stars) break down the specific architecture required to give agents safe, high-fidelity access to your data. You will learn the patterns that power over 6 million monthly tool calls, including:
Raw SQL vs. Semantic Abstraction: A framework for deciding when to give an agent raw query power vs. when to abstract logic into strict semantic tools.
Safety & Governance: Implementing read-only guardrails, query validation, and "Human-in-the-Loop" friction points to prevent accidental data loss or injection risks.
Reducing Hallucinations: How to format database metadata and column descriptions to drastically improve an agent's query accuracy.
Speakers
avatar for Kurtis Van Gent

Kurtis Van Gent

Senior Staff Software Engineer, Google
Kurtis Van Gent is a MCP Core Maintainer and leads the MCP Transports Working Group. By day, he leads AI Ecosystems + Integrations for Google Cloud Databases and helped create MCP Toolbox for Databases.
avatar for Wenxin Du

Wenxin Du

Software Engineer, Google
Wenxin Du is a core maintainer of MCP Toolbox for Databases. She delivered the end-to-end implementation of Toolbox's end-user authorization system and integrated semantic search functionality into Toolbox.
Thursday April 2, 2026 4:30pm - 4:55pm EDT
Broadway Ballroom South (6th Floor)
  MCP Best Practices

5:00pm EDT

CANCELLED - Building Secure, Scalable, and Reliable Agentic AI Systems - Seetaram Rayarao, JP Morgan Chase
Thursday April 2, 2026 5:00pm - 5:25pm EDT
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is rapidly emerging as a foundational standard for building agentic AI systems that interact with tools, data sources, and services in a consistent and interoperable way. However, adopting MCP effectively requires more than basic integration—it demands thoughtful design choices around security, scalability, observability, and reliability.

This session presents practical best practices for implementing MCP in real-world agentic AI applications. It covers how to structure MCP servers and tools, manage context boundaries, handle permissions and sensitive data, and design resilient agent workflows. The talk also explores patterns for prompt engineering, tool invocation, state management, and error handling when using MCP in cloud-native environments.

Attendees will leave with concrete guidance on how to use MCP to move from experimental agents to production-ready systems that are secure, maintainable, and scalable.
Thursday April 2, 2026 5:00pm - 5:25pm EDT
Marquis Ballroom (9th Floor)
  MCP Best Practices

5:00pm EDT

Combine Skills and MCP To Close the Context Gap - Pedro Rodrigues, Supabase
Thursday April 2, 2026 5:00pm - 5:25pm EDT
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
avatar for Pedro Rodrigues

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

5:00pm EDT

MCP Meets Java: Engineering the MCP Java SDK - Dariusz Jędrzejczyk, Broadcom
Thursday April 2, 2026 5:00pm - 5:25pm EDT
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
avatar for Dariusz Jędrzejczyk

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 →
Thursday April 2, 2026 5:00pm - 5:25pm EDT
Astor Ballroom (7th Floor)
  MCP Best Practices
  • Audience Experience Level Any
  • Session Slides Yes

5:30pm EDT

CANCELLED - Building the MCP Search Tool for Any Model - Kevin Yang, Warp
Thursday April 2, 2026 5:30pm - 5:55pm EDT
As MCP adoption grows, power users are connecting multiple servers for various workloads. This creates a challenge: in naive implementations, preloading all tool and resource definitions into the context window can add 50k+ tokens before the agent even starts working. Evaluating our agentic coding users at Warp, we found that ~90% of tasks don't use the MCP context available, and those that do only use few tools.

This led us to question whether MCP context needs to be statically front-loaded. So, we built a model-agnostic MCP search subagent that reduces token usage by 26% for MCP-using tasks and 10% when MCP context is available but unused. All in a model-agnostic implementation.

Attendees will leave with:
• A concrete architecture for dynamic MCP tool/resource discovery
• Evaluation strategies for ensuring search doesn't degrade agent quality
• A look into our model-agnostic implementation to adopt in any agentic coding harness
Speakers
avatar for Kevin Yang

Kevin Yang

Product Engineer, Warp
Kevin is one of Warp's earliest engineers, scaling Warp's AI features from prototype to over a hundred thousand daily users. He currently serves as a Tech Lead for Warp's Code product.
Thursday April 2, 2026 5:30pm - 5:55pm EDT
Marquis Ballroom (9th Floor)
  MCP Best Practices

5:30pm EDT

If the LLM Can't Find You, You Don't Exist: Discoverability for MCP-Apps and ChatGPT Apps - Vincent McLeese, Ghost Team
Thursday April 2, 2026 5:30pm - 5:55pm EDT
The next wave of MCP servers face the same challenge: discoverability. If an LLM doesn't know when to invoke your tool, it doesn't exist. This will compound - ChatGPT has ~80 apps today, but as more LLMs launch app stores and MCP adoption accelerates, there will be millions.

Drawing from research optimizing ChatGPT apps since launch, this talk reveals metadata patterns that determine whether AI systems surface your tools - principles that apply directly to MCP server development.

What I'll cover:
- Two-channel discovery: How static search (registries i.e. ChatGPT's App Store) and dynamic invocation (LLM tool selection) require different optimization strategies.

- How LLMs read metadata: How tool names, descriptions, and parameters shape invocation decisions.

- The golden prompt set: Testing methodology using direct, indirect, and negative prompts to measure recall and precision.

- What converts: Fixed templates, workflow handoffs, context preservation vs anti-patterns that fail.

- Measuring success: Citation tracking, false positive monitoring, and iteration loops that compound discoverability gains.
Speakers
avatar for Vincent McLeese

Vincent McLeese

Product and Tech Lead, Ghost Team
Vincent McLeese is the Product and Tech Lead at Ghost Team, an
MCP Apps agency. He leads the development of appsdiscoverability.com,
a platform devloper by Ghost Team to help mcp apps become more
discoverable. A multiple founder with a background in tech strategy
from Accenture, Vinc



... Read More →
Thursday April 2, 2026 5:30pm - 5:55pm EDT
Broadway Ballroom South (6th Floor)
  MCP Best Practices

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
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
avatar for Sterling Dreyer

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.
Thursday April 2, 2026 5:30pm - 5:55pm EDT
Astor Ballroom (7th Floor)
  MCP Best Practices
  • Audience Experience Level Any
  • Session Slides Yes
 
Friday, April 3
 

11:30am EDT

Code Mode Without the Code - Bob Dickinson, TeamSpark
Friday April 3, 2026 11:30am - 11:55am EDT
Major AI players (Cloudflare, Anthropic, Docker) advocate "Code Mode" - having LLMs generate wrapper MCP servers to orchestrate tools, drastically reducing context usage. However, executing LLM-generated code introduces security risks and compliance challenges.

mcpGraph provides Code Mode benefits without code execution risks. It's a YAML-based DSL for declarative MCP tool orchestration using directed graphs. Tools are defined as graphs with MCP nodes, JSONata transforms, and JSON Logic conditionals, all inspectable and auditable, and exposed to agents as MCP tools themselves.

We'll cover and demo three MCP servers: mcpGraph (the core engine), mcpGraphToolkit (agent development tools for building/testing/deploying graphs, with associated agent skills), and mcpGraphUX (visual inspection and debugging).

This approach delivers Code Mode efficiency while maintaining security, observability, and compliance—no arbitrary code execution required.

mcpGraph is open source and available at: https://github.com/TeamSparkAI/mcpGraph

The presentation will be largely based on this document (and referenced videos): https://github.com/TeamSparkAI/mcpGraph/blob/main/docs/no-code-code-mode.md
Speakers
avatar for Bob Dickinson

Bob Dickinson

Founder, TeamSpark
Serial founder, CTO at scale, and always a hands-on builder. Creator of MCP Tool Vault and the open source projects tsAgent and mcpGraph. Maintainer of MCP Registry and MCP Inspector. Background in security, including as CTO of OneLogin and Censys.
Friday April 3, 2026 11:30am - 11:55am EDT
Astor Ballroom (7th Floor)
  MCP Best Practices

11:30am EDT

Human in the Loop, Agent in the Flow - Harald Kirschner & Connor Peet, Microsoft
Friday April 3, 2026 11:30am - 11:55am EDT
The AI hype cycle promised full automation. Reality delivered hallucinations and agents that guess when they should ask. The MCP spec offers a different vision—humans in control through rich, interactive collaboration rather than micromanaging every step.

This talk explores how recent MCP primitives transform the protocol from text-in-text-out tool-calling into interactive human-agent workflows. We'll cover elicitations that let servers ask clarifying questions with structured forms, async tasks that pause for human decisions and resume seamlessly, and MCP Apps that render interactive UIs—charts, dashboards, confirmations—in sandboxed iframes. Each makes feedback loops faster and agent interactions richer.

Using VS Code's implementation as reference, we'll demonstrate patterns for adaptive autonomy, progressive input gathering, and bidirectional workflows where servers drive the conversation. You'll leave with concrete patterns for building MCP integrations that treat collaboration as a feature, not a fallback.
Speakers
avatar for Harald Kirschner

Harald Kirschner

Principal PM, Microsoft
Harald Kirschner is a Principal Product Manager at Microsoft, building AI coding experiences in VS Code and GitHub Copilot for 40+ million developers. Before Microsoft, he led Firefox DevTools at Mozilla and helped ship Firefox Quantum. His engineering roots (MooTools, early web... Read More →
avatar for Connor Peet

Connor Peet

Principal Software Engineer, Microsoft
Connor is a principal software engineer working on VS Code since 2019.
Friday April 3, 2026 11:30am - 11:55am EDT
Broadway Ballroom South (6th Floor)
  MCP Best Practices

12:00pm EDT

Distributing MCP Servers With OCI To Power Agent Skills - Bobby House, Docker
Friday April 3, 2026 12:00pm - 12:25pm EDT
While it is now considered a best practice for agent skills to leverage MCP servers, there is still no widely accepted approach for how those MCP servers should be distributed, versioned, and shared as dependencies.

This talk presents a practical pattern for using OCI artifacts as a distribution mechanism for MCP servers and configurations that agent skills depend on, enabling reproducible, shareable, and composable agent capabilities.

We’ll walk through creating an agent skill that can build and run an MCP project as a containerized service, then publish supporting artifacts such as the MCP server’s configuration.

Rather than bundling dependencies directly, the agent skill references an OCI artifact by OCI ref, pulls it at runtime, and activates the required MCP servers automatically. This ensures that when prompts expect specific MCP servers to be available, they already are.

By treating OCI as a universal distribution layer for agent tooling metadata and configurations, this approach makes agent skills easier to share, reproduce, and evolve across teams and environments.
Speakers
avatar for Bobby House

Bobby House

Sr Software Engineer, Docker
Bobby House is a senior software engineer at Docker that enjoys building products for engineers. His recent work centers on integrating MCP into enterprise environments by enabling organizations to publish and manage private catalogs of MCP servers as OCI artifacts.
Friday April 3, 2026 12:00pm - 12:25pm EDT
Broadway Ballroom South (6th Floor)
  MCP Best Practices

12:00pm EDT

MCP Live: Streaming Context To AI Agents - Harshit Kohli, Amazon Web Services
Friday April 3, 2026 12:00pm - 12:25pm EDT
Most MCP servers work like snapshots - ask for context, get a response, done. But what happens when your code changes while the AI is working? Or system metrics spike during deployment? Your agent has stale data.

I've been building streaming MCP servers that push live updates to AI agents. Think file watchers notifying code changes, system monitors streaming metrics, or database triggers sending updates as they happen.

I'll walk through building a live log monitoring MCP server from scratch. We'll extend the basic MCP protocol to handle streaming data using WebSockets, implement event subscriptions, and keep agents synchronized with rapidly changing data.

The demo shows an AI agent monitoring application logs in real-time, detecting anomalies and suggesting fixes as errors occur - not minutes later when someone checks the logs.

This isn't theoretical - I'm using similar patterns in production for DevOps monitoring and trading systems. I'll share the code, discuss gotchas, and show how streaming MCP opens up new use cases.

You'll leave with practical patterns for building reactive MCP servers that keep your AI agents always current.
Speakers
avatar for Harshit Kohli

Harshit Kohli

Sr Technical Account Manager, Amazon Web Services
GenAI/Data Driven individual who has 15+ years of experience. Proven experience with AWS Data Analytics/GenAI services, Cloudera Hadoop, Hortonworks Hadoop and Mapr Hadoop. Achieved customer wins over Amazon Q , Bedrock, Amazon Managed Kafka, Amazon Data Firehose, Kinesis Streams... Read More →
Friday April 3, 2026 12:00pm - 12:25pm EDT
Astor Ballroom (7th Floor)
  MCP Best Practices

12:30pm EDT

Solving Context Bloat: Semantic Tool Routing in Multi-Server MCP Environments - Hugo Guerrero, Kong
Friday April 3, 2026 12:30pm - 12:55pm EDT
Agentic systems adopting MCP face a scalability hurdle: managing interactions with numerous servers exposing dozens or hundreds of tools. Injecting all tools into the model context, or "context bloat," increases latency, inflates context window usage, drives up costs, and degrades reasoning quality.

This session introduces the MCP Gateway pattern, an architectural solution to context bloat. This pattern uses an MCP-aware routing layer to dynamically select and inject only the tools semantically relevant to a user request.

We will detail the design and implementation of semantic tool routing utilizing intent classification, embedding-based search, and lightweight prompt analysis. The talk will cover how this routing layer interacts with multiple MCP servers, maintains protocol correctness, and enables just-in-time tool discovery without overwhelming the model.

Attendees will receive a practical blueprint for building scalable, cost-efficient, and modular agentic systems based on MCP. The session emphasizes reusable patterns and reference architectures applicable across the broader MCP ecosystem, independent of any single vendor or runtime.
Speakers
avatar for Hugo Guerrero

Hugo Guerrero

Developer Advoate, Kong
Hugo Guerrero is a tech leader, speaker, and architect obsessed with AI, APIs, and the systems that connect them. From scaling developer ecosystems to mastering event-driven architecture, he focuses on making agentic connectivity a practical reality for modern enterprises. Passionate... Read More →
Friday April 3, 2026 12:30pm - 12:55pm EDT
Broadway Ballroom South (6th Floor)
  MCP Best Practices

2:25pm EDT

From Cypher to Conversation: MCP at WestJet - Anton Lysov, WestJet
Friday April 3, 2026 2:25pm - 2:50pm EDT
At WestJet, our flight schedule is modeled in a Neo4j graph database - airports, routes, aircrafts, seasonal schedules. The data is rich, but accessing it required Cypher expertise most stakeholders don't have.

I built an MCP server to change that. By creating a proxy layer connecting Claude to our Neo4j database, I enabled non-technical colleagues to query complex flight relationships using natural language. No Cypher. No waiting for developers. Just questions and answers.

This talk covers the journey from idea to working pilot: why I chose MCP, how I architected a proxy server wrapping the Neo4j MCP server, and what I learned deploying it internally. I'll give a live demo showing how analysts can explore our flight network conversationally.

This isn't a top-down initiative. It's about individual ownership - recognizing potential in data your team already maintains and using MCP to unlock value for people who couldn't access it before.
Whether you're exploring MCP for enterprise data or graph databases, this talk offers a practical, beginner-friendly blueprint.
Speakers
avatar for Anton Lysov

Anton Lysov

Software Developer, WestJet
Anton Lysov is a Software Developer at WestJet, working on backend systems that power westjet.com, mobile apps, and services used by teams across the organization. Before WestJet, he was one of the first hires at Rafflebox, helping build a platform that raised over $500M CAD for nonprofits... Read More →
slides pdf
Friday April 3, 2026 2:25pm - 2:50pm EDT
Astor Ballroom (7th Floor)
  MCP Best Practices
  • Audience Experience Level Beginner
  • Session Slides Yes

2:25pm EDT

The Tool Abstraction Problem: Lessons Learned Building 1000+ MCP Tools - Sam Partee, Arcade.dev
Friday April 3, 2026 2:25pm - 2:50pm EDT
Before MCP, Arcade was building tools for LLM agents. We've shipped over 1,000 tools—first as native Arcade tools with our own protocol and eventually adopting MCP. The main lesson: the hard part isn't writing the code, it's finding the right abstraction.

Most MCP tools today are thin wrappers around APIs. `GET /users/{id}` becomes `get_user(id)`. But this creates a mismatch—LLMs reason about tasks ("find the customer who complained last week"), not endpoints. The question is: where should tools sit on the abstraction spectrum?

**Too low-level:** The agent needs to chain together many calls. Each step is a chance to fail, and the model has to maintain context across all of them. You're asking the LLM to be a programmer at runtime.

**Too high-level:** You end up enumerating every possible task as its own tool. This defeats the point of having a general-purpose agent and your tool schema balloons, eating context and degrading selection accuracy.


In this talk:

- The common pitfalls we see in MCP tool design
- Our design philosophy for optimized tools
- Multiple real-world use cases and the tools that work for them
- Outlook on future tool development
Speakers
avatar for Sam Partee

Sam Partee

CTO and Co-founder, Arcade.dev
Sam is the CTO and co-founder of Arcade.dev. Before starting Arcade, Sam lead the led the applied AI team at Redis responsible for the vector database offering. He is a avid OSS developer and has contributed on projects like Langchain, LlamaIndex, Chapel, DeterminedAI, and others... Read More →
Friday April 3, 2026 2:25pm - 2:50pm EDT
Broadway Ballroom South (6th Floor)
  MCP Best Practices
  • Audience Experience Level Advanced
  • Session Slides Yes

2:55pm EDT

Lessons Learned Building Intelligent UIs With MCP Apps - Riley Scheid, Reboot (reboot.dev)
Friday April 3, 2026 2:55pm - 3:20pm EDT
With MCP Apps, AI interactions are no longer limited to text. MCP Apps unlock the full power of the web within AI chat, allowing us to build AI-enriched UIs that persist, react and collaborate in real-time.

Through a series of demos and code deep-dives, I’ll showcase foundational patterns that we've found to be effective as MCP Apps gain ubiquity.

Durability: Demo a “text snippet saver” that persists across conversation, thread, and even different AI clients enabling shared memory that follows you everywhere.

Async tasks: Start an async audio transcription job, monitor it with a progress bar, and receive a completion notification in chat, while other work continues.

Realtime sync: See the job we just ran come alive as we play the original audio file with the text transcript rendering in perfect sync.

Multiplayer: Join me in a live collaborative drawing demo accessible through a public MCP server. Draw your best race car in real-time while we watch everyone’s creations come to life. The best drawing wins a prize!

The purpose of these demos is to spark imagination and show a glimpse of the future of intelligent UIs that go beyond the capabilities of the modern web.
Speakers
avatar for Riley Scheid

Riley Scheid

Founding Engineer, Reboot (reboot.dev)
Full stack engineer / human Swiss Army Knife with a decade of professional experience
Friday April 3, 2026 2:55pm - 3:20pm EDT
Astor Ballroom (7th Floor)
  MCP Best Practices

2:55pm EDT

The MCP Gateway Pattern: Aggregation, Composition, and Beyond - Juan Antonio Osorio, Stacklok
Friday April 3, 2026 2:55pm - 3:20pm EDT
Here's a scenario that might sound familiar: you've got ten MCP servers, which means ten client connections, ten auth flows, and ten different places where things can break. One reason teams end up in this mess is that each MCP server solves a real problem - so you add another one, and another, and suddenly you've got MCP sprawl.

Enter the MCP Gateway pattern.

In this talk, we'll walk through an architecture that aggregates multiple MCP backends behind a single unified interface. We'll cover the fun problems this creates - what happens when two backends expose tools with the same name? and show how declarative workflow composition lets you orchestrate multi-step operations across backends without writing custom wrapper code.

We'll demo a gateway unifying several backends and executing a workflow defined entirely in YAML. No magic, just patterns you can apply to your own infrastructure.

With this in mind, you'll leave with practical approaches to taming MCP sprawl while keeping your security policies consistent across the board.
Speakers
avatar for Juan A. Osorio

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 →
Friday April 3, 2026 2:55pm - 3:20pm EDT
Broadway Ballroom South (6th Floor)
  MCP Best Practices
  • Audience Experience Level Advanced
  • Session Slides Yes

3:25pm EDT

From Benchmarks To Business Value: Building a Use-Case Specific Agent Evaluation Framework - Gaurav Saxena, Independent & Matvey Kukuy, Archestra.AI
Friday April 3, 2026 3:25pm - 3:50pm EDT
While frontier models achieve impressive scores on benchmarks like MCP Atlas (62.3%) and SWE-bench (62.1%), these metrics don't answer the critical question: "Will this agent work for OUR specific use-case?"This talk presents a practical framework for building custom agent evaluation systems tailored to your organization's needs. We'll cover the complete lifecycle: data collection and categorization, open-source instrumentation patterns, and production monitoring for long-term performance tracking. You'll learn to construct evaluation datasets reflecting actual workloads, implement testing harnesses mirroring production constraints, and establish monitoring pipelines that catch degradations early.We'll demonstrate techniques for measuring agent reliability across accuracy, latency, cost, and safety dimensions while accounting for real-world variables: prompt engineering, data quality, MCP tool availability, and model selection. Attendees will leave with actionable strategies to build confidence in production deployments and create feedback loops for continuous improvement.
Speakers
avatar for Gaurav Saxena

Gaurav Saxena

Director of Engineering
Gaurav Saxena is an engineering leader in the field of platform and cloud engineering with over 20 years of experience in the software industry. His technical expertise includes Stream-based architectures, Kubernetes, Service Mesh, Software Supply Chain Security, and Observabilit... Read More →
avatar for Matvey Kukuy

Matvey Kukuy

CEO, Archestra.AI
Maintainer: Grafana OnCall, KeepHQ, Archestra.AI.

Ex-Engineering Director at Grafana Labs.
Friday April 3, 2026 3:25pm - 3:50pm EDT
Broadway Ballroom South (6th Floor)
  MCP Best Practices

4:20pm EDT

MCP Servers in the Wild: Managing Tool Complexity at Scale - Arnav Balyan, Concierge AI
Friday April 3, 2026 4:20pm - 4:45pm EDT
As MCPs are adopted at scale, certain patterns start to emerge:
1. Increase in wrong tool calls
2. increase in token usage, semantic loss
3. agents skipping the required tool call sequence.

For high stakes domains such as finance and infrastructure, this leads to reliability and compliance risk.

This talk presents a new MCP server design pattern for addressing this class of problems called: "progressive tool exposure".
Rather than assuming static tools, the MCP server actively controls which tools are visible to the agent at each point in execution. This framework ensures, tools are refreshed, scoped, and changed as the agent progresses through an MCP workflow. This allows the server to direct the agent’s action space, guide execution order, and enforce "runbooks" without changing server/ agent capability. This design pattern also tracks state ensuring backtracking of tool calls reverts the server side state, making agent behaviour as transactional on the MCP server.

We show how such practices reduce invalid tool calls, lower inference costs, and improve determinism for tool heavy systems.
Speakers
avatar for Arnav Balyan

Arnav Balyan

CEO, Concierge AI
Founder of Concierge AI. Ex-Uber building MCP systems at scale. Concierge AI manages 400+ public MCP deployments, Arnav focuses on MCP tool complexity and researches token overhead reduction at scale.
Friday April 3, 2026 4:20pm - 4:45pm EDT
Broadway Ballroom South (6th Floor)
  MCP Best Practices

4:50pm EDT

Your MCP Server Will Probably Be Abandoned...Or Not - Lahari Chowtoori, Amazon Web Services, Inc.
Friday April 3, 2026 4:50pm - 5:15pm EDT
Here's what's going to happen: MCP takes off. Hundreds of MCP servers get built. Most of them end up unmaintained within two years and then issues pile up, PRs go stale, the original author moves on.

I have spent time digging through MCPZoo, a dataset of 56,000+ MCP servers, and the warning signs are already there. Repos with READMEs that just say "install and run." Projects with one contributor and no activity in months. Issues sitting unanswered. The ecosystem is growing fast, but a lot of what's being built has "abandoned in 6 months" written all over it.

I'm sure some of you have tried contributing to these projects. Couldn't run the tests. Couldn't understand the structure. Couldn't tell if anyone was still around. That friction isn't just annoying, it's why maintainers burn out and contributors disappear.

In this talk, I'll break down what makes an MCP server thrive or die. Projects die when newcomers can't onboard, can't run tests, can't understand the structure. The ones that survive do specific things: working CI from day one, a README that gets someone running in under 5 minutes, clear contributor guidelines. I'll show you how to set up your own projects to last.
Speakers
avatar for Lahari Chowtoori

Lahari Chowtoori

Open Source TPM, AI/ML, AWS
Lahari Chowtoori is an AI enthusiast and Technical Program Manager at AWS, focusing on open source, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence. With a background in Data Science and Machine Learning, she is passionate about democratizing AI knowledge and fostering community collaboration.She... Read More →
Friday April 3, 2026 4:50pm - 5:15pm EDT
Broadway Ballroom South (6th Floor)
  MCP Best Practices
  • Audience Experience Level Any

5:20pm EDT

Reflections on Context Engineering Via MCP Servers - Till Döhmen, MotherDuck
Friday April 3, 2026 5:20pm - 5:45pm EDT
Effective context engineering via MCP servers requires understanding how host agents weave the server's responses into their context as conversations unfold.

Context flows through more channels than tool definitions alone: initial instructions, the tool set itself (explicit tools vs. generic execution tools), tool names and parameters, descriptions, response content, structure and length, error feedback, "skill-loading" tools, resources, and sub-agent delegation.

Each mechanism involves trade-offs. Eager loading of context risks bloat; lazy loading adds tool calls. Rich tool responses help agents self-correct but consume tokens. Sub-agents compartmentalize complexity, but limited client support for elicitation creates friction.

Getting this balance right means staying conscious of how much context you're injecting, when, and at what cost (e.g. in # of tool calls to achieve a goal)—a balancing act that's hard without a clear picture of what's happening inside the host agent's context window.

This talk aims at providing a framework for thinking about these decisions—grounded in concrete examples from building the MotherDuck MCP Server.
Speakers
avatar for Till Döhmen

Till Döhmen

AI Lead, MotherDuck
Till Döhmen is AI Lead at MotherDuck, where he focuses on building agentic experiences for data analytics. He designed and built the MotherDuck MCP Server, enabling AI agents to query and analyze data through Claude, Cursor, and other MCP clients. Till is also a final-year PhD candidate... Read More →
Friday April 3, 2026 5:20pm - 5:45pm EDT
Broadway Ballroom South (6th Floor)
  MCP Best Practices
 
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