It doesn't do it magically. The "tools" an LLM agent calls to create responses are typically REST APIs for these services.

Previously, many companies gated these APIs but with the MCP AI hype they are incentivized to expose what you can achieve with APIs through an agent service.

Incentives align here: user wants automations on data and actions on a service they are already using, company wants AI marketing, USP in automation features and still gets to control the output of the agent.

> Previously, many companies gated these APIs but with the MCP AI hype they are incentivized to expose what you can achieve with APIs through an agent service.

Why would they be incentivized to do that if they survived all the previous hype waves and still have access gated?

> user wants automations on data and actions on a service they are already using,

How many users want that? Why didn't companies do all this before, since the need for automation has always been there?

> Why would they be incentivized to do that if they survived all the previous hype waves and still have access gated?

Because they suddenly now don't want to be left out of the whole AI hype/wave.

Is it stupid? Yes. Can we still reap the benefits of these choices driven by stupid motivations? Also yes.

> Because they suddenly now don't want to be left out of the whole AI hype/wave.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44405491 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44408434