MCP Dev Summit [Day 1] Ft. Anthropic, Hugging Face, Open AI & Microsoft

Why It Matters

MCP’s explosive adoption and the AIF’s structured open‑source governance give businesses a scalable, interoperable foundation for building and deploying agentic AI solutions, accelerating innovation while lowering integration costs.

Key Takeaways

• Agentic AI Foundation reaches 170 members in under four months.
• MCP SDK downloads exceed 110 million per month, outpacing React.
• New leadership appoints Masin Gilbert as AIF executive director.
• Global tour announced: seven cities plus Agent Con and MCPCon events.
• Open‑source governance introduces project lifecycle: growth, impact, emeritus.

Summary

The third MCP Dev Summit kicked off in New York, showcasing the rapid maturation of the Agentic AI Foundation (AIF) and its flagship Model Connectivity Protocol (MCP). Organizers highlighted a surge in community participation, a slate of global events, and a leadership transition that positions the foundation for sustained growth.

Within just four months, AIF’s membership swelled to 170 organizations—more than double CNCF’s early‑stage numbers—while sponsors ranging from Anthropic to Google Cloud underscored industry confidence. The summit also unveiled a worldwide tour covering seven cities and two flagship conferences (Agent Con and MCPCon), and announced Masin Gilbert, a PhD‑trained AI researcher with an MBA from Wharton, as the new executive director.

MCP’s adoption metrics were a focal point: over 110 million SDK downloads per month, a pace that React took three years to achieve, illustrating a clear market demand for a universal agentic‑AI interface. Speakers emphasized the importance of open‑source interoperability, noting that the foundation has instituted a formal project‑life‑cycle (growth, impact, emeritus) to streamline contributions and governance.

The rapid expansion signals that MCP is becoming the de‑facto standard for connecting AI agents to data, services, and legacy systems. For enterprises, this means faster integration, reduced duplication of effort, and a clear roadmap for participating in an open‑source ecosystem that could shape the next generation of autonomous applications.

Original Description

Keynote Sessions (Broadway Ballroom / Main Stage)

Thursday, April 2

9:00 AM – 9:30 AM: Welcome & Opening Keynote: Standardizing the Intelligence Layer – Adam Seligman (Workato)

9:30 AM – 10:00 AM: The Future of MCP: A Technical Roadmap – David Soria Parra (Anthropic)

10:00 AM – 10:10 AM: Lessons Learned from Driving Enterprise MCP Adoption – Sheng Liang (Obot AI)

10:10 AM – 10:40 AM: Engineering the Agentic Era – Paul Carleton (Anthropic)

Friday, April 3

9:00 AM – 9:45 AM: Opening Keynote: MCP at Scale – David Nalley (AWS)

9:45 AM – 10:15 AM: Secure Containerization for MCP Servers – Cecilia Liu (Docker)

10:15 AM – 10:45 AM: Unhobbling Enterprise Agents – Diamond Bishop (Datadog)

Astor Ballroom (Track 1) Sessions

Thursday, April 2

11:30 AM – 11:55 AM: Securing the Enterprise Runtime: Managing and Observing MCP Tooling – Alharith Hussin (Alterion)

11:55 AM – 12:20 PM: Fireside Chat: The Evolution of Developer Protocols – Rick Nucci (Guru) & Jonathan Rochelle (Lutely)

12:20 PM – 12:45 PM: Beyond Frameworks: Building Runtime-Agnostic AI Agents – Harshul Jain (Audible) & Abhishek Khanna (Blueflame AI)

2:00 PM – 2:25 PM: MCP or Not MCP: That Is the Question – Du'An Lightfoot (AWS)

2:25 PM – 2:50 PM: Secure Your MCP Servers with OAuth, JWT, SPIFFE and More – Lin Sun (Solo.io)

2:50 PM – 3:15 PM: From MCP Chaos to Clarity: EnrichMCP (The ORM Pattern for Production Data) – Saurabh Yergattikar (eBay)

3:15 PM – 3:40 PM: MCP Through the Travel Funnel: From Exploration to Booking – Sanjay Vakil (DirectBooker)

4:10 PM – 5:10 PM: Closing Panel: MCP in the Wild: GTM and Engineering Workflows at Scale – Jonathan Freeland, Shashank Khanna, & Hillary Curran