Editor’s Note From Mike: Tom Critchlow is taking the stage in two weeks at BRXND NYC 2026. We jammed a bit this morning on this session and I promise it’s going to be the most interesting AI search talk this year.
As a little amuse bouche, he recorded a great interview with our friend Sam Knight and wrote the accompanying piece. Tom, the mic is yours!
Of course, if you don’t yet have a ticket to BRXND to see Tom and the rest of our speakers on stage, the big button below can fix that.
We’ll officially announce our full speaker lineup and the agenda early next week but you might notice a few new faces if you head over to our homepage……
Should your brand have an MCP?
Should your brand have an MCP?
This sounds like a technical question at first, but actually belongs in the boardroom. It’s really a question of whether you’re willing to let your brand be disintermediated by AI… Will you cede the interface to the model?
This is the real “GEO” or “AI search” question brands should be asking - not “how often are we cited” but “does our brand help customers complete tasks”. This is the billion dollar existential question for brands in the AI age - will we survive, or will we become an invisible MCP call.
A year ago, Brian Balfour wrote The Next Great Distribution Shift:
“But I believe we’re on the precipice of something bigger. The next great distribution shift is coming, and it’s going to reshape how products find users just as dramatically as search engines and app stores did before it.
When this shift happens—and the early signals suggest it’s already beginning—there will be extraordinary windows of opportunity. There will also be casualties.”
I think we now know what that distribution shift and opportunity is: MCPs.
Atlassian is up to 15m MCP calls / day (more actually) - up from 5m in July
Resend is 3x growth from Aug -> Sep
Monday.com 2x from Jul -> Sep (35m)
Mercury “exponential MCP growth” according to the CEO
But! this presents a bargain as old as time. As Brian says - extraordinary opportunities, but also casualties. To open up your brand to a 3rd party or to lock down the walls and control distribution. Different brands are making different calls on this right now. Just this morning Walmart opened up their MCP, while Amazon continues to block agents:
“Walmart is embracing agentic commerce with the launch of its own Agent Gateway to manage transactions and other new features aimed at customers using AI agents, the retailer announced on Wednesday. The move comes shortly after Walmart’s top competitor, Amazon, began blocking AI agents from making purchases on behalf of online shoppers.”
This same story is playing out across industries - Notion is all in on MCP while Figma is being cautious, Booking.com has an MCP while Airbnb does not…
This is fundamentally a question of how much claim over the customer you have and how much preference your brand has… And this isn’t static! As markets and technologies move this changes and evolves. An illustrative example for hotel chains:
To MCP or not to MCP that is the question. This week on the Alephic podcast Sam and I break it down. As you might expect, I’ve got some strong opinions:
Mass adoption of harnesses and assistants is opening up the dawn of a new GTM paradigm as big as the internet or the app store.
Every brand should be building an MCP, even if they don’t release it publicly yet, so they can understand how the interface works.
Agentic assistants doesn’t mean prices go down - for differentiated services prices will go up as consumers reveal richer preferences
Intermediaries aren’t going away. But they might be massively disrupted. Shout out to this great paper from 1995 on the rise of “cybermediaries”. Remember we thought that the internet would remove intermediaries, but in fact that didn’t happen!
MCPs are not neutral! The UX of the MCP matters (really AX - agentic experience). The way you design it changes how agents and consumers interact with it. You can merchandise inside an MCP with related offers, special offers, loyalty and more.
We’re going to see an explosion of MCP-first businesses (spoiler: I’m building one inside Alephic for a client right now) and the rise of agents as consumers will lead to new kinds of platforms (what happens when G2 reviews are written by agents and the volume is 1000x what it is today?)
Ultimately there’s a generational shift in distribution and attention happening. But it’s a double edged sword for brands and the way through isn’t always clear.
To watch my full discussion with Sam on Youtube, head on over here!
If you have any questions, please be in touch. As always, thanks for reading.
— Mike
Timely - literally from the Spotify earnings call today:
"As listening shifts to third-party AI agents, as with the new Muse integration, who owns the customer relationship and the data, and how do you keep that from turning Spotify into a back-end supplier?"
This is a board level concern everywhere.
The overall topic of disintermediation is a rich one, but the MCP question is or soon will be moot. I scape, operate, and manipulate any site out there with my AI, and there is absolutely nothing any brand can do about it unless they shut down their web site.