The New Plumbing: What MCP's Rise to Industry Standard Means for Enterprise Data Strategy

In March 2026, Digital Applied reported that Anthropic's Model Context Protocol had crossed 97 million installs in just 16 months, a faster adoption curve than most enterprise infrastructure standards ever achieve. OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft are all now shipping MCP-compatible tooling. What started as one company's open standard has quietly become the default interface between AI agents and the systems they work with. But is 97 million installs the moment a standard becomes infrastructure or just a very large number? In this episode of Eventual Consistency, Ross Katz sits down with James Winegar to unpack what MCP's rise actually means for the companies building on it, the enterprises adopting it, and the data leaders who are going to be asked to make decisions about it. James argues that the standardization happened much earlier than most people realize; the install count is a lagging indicator, not the inflection point. The real question now isn't whether to pay attention to MCP, but how to build for a world where it's the default. And the answer, he contends, isn't to throw AI at your raw source systems and hope for the best. The companies that will win are the ones that do the foundational work first: getting data into a warehouse, modeling it properly, and then giving AI agents a well-scaffolded, cost-efficient interface to query against, rather than burning compute calling out to Salesforce, your ERP, and five other SaaS platforms in real time and hoping the answer comes back with reasonable fidelity. The episode also gets into the tension between MCP and CLI tooling, when each is the right interface, why startups are naturally gravitating toward MCP to get to market fast, and why the security and authentication story around MCP is still catching up to what enterprise compliance actually requires. James draws a sharp distinction between MCP servers that authenticate as a privileged service account and those that can actually propagate user-level permissions and explains why that distinction matters enormously once HIPAA, SOC 2, or SEC compliance enters the conversation. Ross and James close with a provocation: by 2028, what does the world look like for a data team that treated MCP as someone else's infrastructure problem? About the Hosts Ross Katz brings a background in analytics and data strategy, working with companies to cut through the noise and focus on what actually drives business value. With experience spanning industries such as e-commerce, education, biotech, and finance, as well as the evolving landscape of AI-enabled work, he focuses on the intersection of data capabilities and business outcomes. He's particularly interested in how shifts in technology change not just what's possible but also how people think about and use data in their daily work. James Winegar is a data consultant who has spent years in the trenches helping enterprise organizations actually implement the technologies that vendors promise will revolutionize their business. He specializes in data infrastructure, real-time systems, and the practical realities of what works when the proof of concept becomes production. His approach is skeptical, pragmatic, and focused on the economics of technology decisions, a lens he brings to bear throughout this episode on the real costs of getting MCP wrong and what it actually takes to make AI agents useful in a production enterprise environment. Connect with us:  Sponsor: CorrDyn, a data consultancyConnect with Ross Katz on LinkedInConnect with James Winegar on LinkedIn