Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a way to build integrations for AI models. Vercel now supports deploying MCP servers (which AI models can connect to) as well as MCP clients ( AI chatbot applications which call the servers). Get started with our Next.js MCP template today. Link to heading How is MCP different than APIs? APIs allow different services to communicate together. MCP is slightly different. Rather than thinking about MCP like a REST API, you can instead think about it like a tailored toolkit that helps an AI achieve a particular task. There may be multiple APIs and other business logic used behind the scenes for a single MCP tool. If you are already familiar with tool-calling in AI , MCP is a way to invoke tools hosted on a different server. MCP now supports a protocol similar to other web APIs, namely using HTTP and OAuth. This is an improvement from the previous stateful Server-Sent Events (SSE) protocol.…