Agentic AI is escaping the dev lab, with open-source MCP tools reshaping business ops

Agentic AI is breaking out of the dev lab. As businesses go all-in on AI, the next big leap is making these tools work for everyone—not just coders. Trevor Uptain, Head of Engineering at Fair Square and former Google ML engineer, wants to help agentic AI reach every corner of the business with MCP Kit, his new open-source framework built for scale.

MCPs for the masses: "I'm excited to see an MCP tool for everything under the sun," says Uptain. "The business use case deserves those agentic flows just as much as software engineers do." That belief is driving his open-source framework, built to let anyone spin up MCP tools in minutes. With eight integrations ready to go and hundreds more planned, Uptain is working to make agentic AI work across the entire organization, not just in engineering.

Corral the chaos: Uptain’s conviction comes from years of hands-on experience with AI-assisted development—now a non-negotiable in his toolkit. "If you're not starting to use these kinds of tools right now—Cursor and Windsurf—you’re going to get left behind very quickly," he warns. After a decade of manual coding, he sees a sharp divide: "Vibe coding is like shooting from the hip. AI-assisted coding is like having a team of really smart but junior engineers who often go off the rails. But if you know how to corral them, you can do amazing things."

Shepherd still required: Despite their power, today’s LLMs aren’t plug-and-play. "They’re the glue that enables the APIs to work with each other without any additional configuration," Uptain explains—but only with the right human touch. As models plateau on complex tasks, he stresses the need for active guidance. "You have to write great prompts. You have to really guide it and tell it what to do," says Uptain. Full autonomy? "It’ll happen someday," he says, "but right now it’s not possible."

Watchdog mentality: Until full autonomy arrives, human oversight isn’t optional. "You want to be very present in the chat interface. Watching it, seeing what’s going on, stopping it if it’s about to go off the rails, and re-prompting it," Uptain advises. That kind of vigilance is critical as his framework enters an open-source agent space that’s growing fast but still early enough to shape around real business needs.

Get chatty: Despite current limits, Uptain sees agentic tools unlocking "potentially enormous" scale, and changing how we use the web. "I think the days of swiping and opening apps is over," he says. "If you can just interact through the entire web through a chat interface, why wouldn’t you?" In his view, LLMs will soon run the web for us—no app store required.