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MCP Guides
MCP Apps: ushering in the era of interactive AI interfaces
Some big news just dropped a few days ahead of the one-year anniversary of MCP. MCP Apps, an official extension that brings interactive interfaces to the Model Context Protocol, marks an inflection point for how humans and agents collaborate online.
When MCP was first introduced, the goal was clear: give AI a structured, reliable way to act on the digital world rather than just talk about it. Instead of scraping websites or clumsily navigating UIs designed for humans, models could call tools, retrieve context, and complete tasks on our behalf.
The evolution since then has followed a steady logic. First came remote execution, which made it possible for agents to interact with services across machines and networks. Next came secure authentication with OAuth 2.1 and Dynamic Client Registration, giving agents a safe way to identify themselves at scale.
For almost a year, the missing piece was UI. The community asked for it repeatedly because visual interaction is essential for many tasks. OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT Apps back in October gave everyone an early preview of the potential. Developers saw that UI could unlock a richer form of collaboration between humans and agents.
MCP Apps now brings that same idea to the entire ecosystem, in an open, interoperable form.
This marks an extremely important shift. UI becomes a bridge between human intent and agent action. Instead of forcing people through rigid click-paths or forcing a handoff between human and agent, agents can surface just the right interface at the right moment. This is a small piece of a bigger transition: an internet where humans interact with AI first, not with static websites. The website is no longer the primary entry point. AI, i.e. the agent, is.
Bringing back UI, what this means for businesses
MCP Apps reintroduce UI into an agent-first world in a way that feels more flexible than the traditional web interface. Instead of replacing your product surface, UI becomes something the agent can pull in contextually: a small panel when needed, a full experience when useful, or nothing at all when the task is simple. This means several shifts for both consumer businesses and software companies.
For consumer businesses
Your brand becomes visible again.
Early MCP interactions bypassed the visual identity of a service entirely. With UI, brands can reappear in a controlled, lightweight way. You can present visual elements, structured content, and guidance without forcing users to leave their conversational flow. This also restores predictability and control over the customer journey compared to earlier approaches where LLMs relied on web scraping.
Example of a ChatGPT App for flight booking from Kiwi.com
You can imagine entirely new experiences.
Interfaces are no longer static pages. They can be generated, adapted, and surfaced based on user intent. A travel service might show a comparison table only when the agent needs help narrowing choices to reduce noise. A retailer might surface product photos, availability, and sizing hints only when relevant to increase conversion rates, or might offer complementary products during the conversation.
Rich content becomes part of the interaction.
Images, summaries, previews, and confirmations fit naturally into MCP Apps. This means you can shape moments that build trust and clarity, like showing a booking summary or a cart preview, without a full website handoff.
For B2B SaaS
Interfaces can finally reflect the task, not the structure of your product.
Traditional dashboards force users into your navigation model. With MCP Apps, the UI can be generated for the prompt at hand. A finance tool can show just the budget approval panel. A CRM can surface only the fields needed for a quick update. This enables SaaS companies to provide both the familiar components that make their product unique without the constraints of the full-fledged dashboard.
2. No more steep onboarding curve.
Agents guide users through the workflow, and the UI appears only when needed. This lowers the learning barrier for internal tools, especially those that historically require training or documentation, thus saving your teams on setup time and your customers in onboarding your tool.
3. Your product becomes accessible to more people inside an organization.
A teammate who rarely logs into your SaaS product can still complete tasks through an agent, aided by small, focused UI components. The system becomes usable by occasional users, not only experts, helping SaaS companies increase the stickiness of their solutions and provide value more broadly across the company.
How MCP Apps works
At a high level, MCP Apps adds a simple idea to the MCP protocol: servers can now provide small, self-contained interface elements that any MCP-compatible app can display. These interfaces are declared to the LLM upfront, reviewed for safety, and shown inside a secure iframe. They communicate with the agent using the same structured messages MCP already uses.
The result is an AI-native interface that feels consistent, predictable, and safe across clients.
MCP Apps vs. ChatGPT Apps
Given how close the two announcements landed, it’s natural to compare MCP Apps with OpenAI’s ChatGPT Apps.
ChatGPT Apps and MCP Apps both deliver UI using MCP; however, ChatGPT Apps are designed specifically for ChatGPT. MCP Apps, by contrast, define a client-agnostic UI standard inside the Model Context Protocol itself, meaning that any MCP-compatible client can render them. In short, ChatGPT Apps are a ChatGPT feature, while MCP Apps are an ecosystem feature compatible across multiple LLMs. However, as OpenAI was heavily involved in authoring MCP Apps, there is hope that the two may converge.
What’s next?
MCP Apps is more than just a protocol extension or a feature upgrade. It gives agents the missing layer they need to interact with humans in a way that feels more natural. It also gives businesses a new surface to shape their customer experience in an AI-first world. As more services become accessible through agents, the ability to deliver focused, contextual UI will become a core part of how products are used and discovered. This extension is an early but important step toward that future.
In our next article, we’ll do a technical deep dive into how MCP Apps work and how they compare to ChatGPT Apps as well as the open-source MCP-UI project!
If you’d like to get started building your ChatGPT or MCP Apps, contact us today!
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