Beyond the Protocol: The Agentic Stack Enterprises Say Is Still Missing

MCP Dev Summit Toronto 2026

Oct 5, 2026 · 14:55–15:20 · Timezone not confirmed

MCP became the default way enterprise agents reach tools and data in barely a year. Will it last? For a Linux Foundation Research and Agentic AI Foundation study, we interviewed 22 leaders building and running agentic systems: open source contributors and enterprise operators in regulated industries across the globe.Almost all of them use MCP. Few agree on its future. Some think better models and skills will make it less necessary, and one retail Head of AI told us it might disappear altogether. They agreed more on what MCP doesn't cover: agent-to-agent communication, identity, and discovery, the layers that decide whether agents from different vendors can work together. Two patterns came up again and again: 1) A gateway sitting between agents and models for governance and cost control, and 2) guardrails enforced below the model rather than through prompts, since a model can't police the same channel used to hijack it. The recurring point: trust, not capability, is what separates a demo from something a company will actually run in production. I'll walk through what our findings mean for where developers should spend their effort.

Session status: scheduled

Room: Ballroom East/Center

Track: Enterprise Adoption + Integration

Level: Any

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In person · The Conference Centre at the University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

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