Microsoft Build: the connection standard just won
Microsoft announced today it is adopting MCP across its products and joining its steering committee. Six months from publication to industry default.
At Build, opening today 19 May 2025, Microsoft announced it is integrating the Model Context Protocol across GitHub, Copilot Studio, Dynamics 365, Azure and Windows, and joining the protocol’s steering committee. It also introduced an asynchronous coding agent for GitHub Copilot.
This blog called MCP « boring and important » when Anthropic published it on 25 November. OpenAI adopted it in March. Microsoft has now built it into the operating system. Six months, three of the largest players, one specification.
Why this is genuinely unusual
Standards normally take years and usually produce two competing camps. This one went from one company’s publication to a cross-industry default faster than almost any comparable specification.
The reason is the one given in March: nobody was winning the integration problem and everybody was paying for it separately. When that is true, a standard spreads at the speed of self-interest.
What actually changes for an SME
Not immediately much. Over two years, quite a lot.
The practical question that has blocked most SME AI projects — will this work with the systems we already have? — starts to have a structural answer rather than a per-vendor one. If your ERP vendor supports the standard and your AI tool supports the standard, the connection stops being a bespoke project.
That is the single biggest cost item in most of these projects, as the 14 May post set out. Removing it changes which projects are worth doing at all.
The question to add to procurement, now
To your ERP, accounting and document vendors, not your AI vendor: do you support the Model Context Protocol, and if not, is it on your roadmap?
Most Swiss business software vendors will say no this year. Ask anyway. It costs an email, it tells you something about how closely they follow their own field, and in eighteen months the answers will have changed and you will know who moved first.
The caution
A standard for connecting is not a standard for permissions. Everything from the March access post and the 12 May injection post still applies: what a tool can reach, and what it may do once it gets there, remain your decisions. The plumbing getting easier makes those decisions more important, not less.