I haven't written anything lately because, honestly, I just didn't have the headspace for it. There were a few reasons, but the biggest one was my talk at AGNTCon + MCPCon Europe, where I spoke about WebMCP.
How did it go? Great! A lot of people showed up, they asked questions — what more could I ask for? 😅 The conference itself was amazing too, and I definitely came back with enough inspiration for several more articles. I don't have any nice photos yet, but maybe next week!
The audience at an event with more than 2,000 attendees is, of course, incredibly diverse, with very different interests. Alongside people eager to explore sophisticated multi-agent architectures, there were many who were simply wondering how they could improve their already pretty good products by adding some AI capabilities.
In short, WebMCP is an experimental browser API that allows a website to explicitly expose tools that an AI agent can then call. I don't want to repeat myself too much because I've already written about it here:
That article is more than three months old, which, in the world of Agentic AI, means the syntax is already outdated. xD Fortunately, these days it's not particularly difficult to quickly check the latest one, especially since it may still change several more times. 😅
Yes, it's still a young technology. But as it happens, I met one of the people working on WebMCP at the conference (hi, Dominic!), and he told me that around January or February it should be reasonably stable, at least in Chromium. So the clock is ticking!
Unlike "classic" MCP (and I'm putting classic in quotation marks because I'm not sure whether something this young has earned the right to be called "classic" or "traditional" yet 🤣) WebMCP operates in the context of the browser.
The website needs to be open, the user needs to be logged in if authentication is required, and only then can our agent call the tools exposed by that page. This means we can use WebMCP through an agentic browser or, for example, a Chrome extension. Interestingly, ChatGPT has recently added support for WebMCP-based site tools in its built-in browser, so this technology definitely has some momentum!
That's also why, in my opinion, WebMCP's most interesting use case isn't necessarily multi-agent systems scraping websites. I see it much more as a way to help regular, everyday users interact with the products they already use. Although, of course, give ten developers a new API and you'll probably get eleven different ideas. 😉
As some of you may remember, my WebMCP demo isn't another boring addToCart() example. It's my beloved visionary leader: AI CEO Simulator. It shows what might happen if we let AI run our company.
As you can see in the screenshot, we have all the typical startup metrics: cash, monthly revenue, number of employees, production incidents, employee happiness, and, obviously, hype level.
We also have board decisions such as Adopt AI, Pivot to Agents, Rewrite in Rust, Fire Employees, Hire Employees, and so on.
The important thing is that this is still a completely normal website. You can click around and use everything manually. Because that's one of the things I love about WebMCP: it's an additional capability for your website. You don't need to completely rebuild your product around AI.
GitHub: https://github.com/sylwia-lask/ai-ceo-webMCP Demo: https://sylwia-lask.github.io/ai-ceo-webMCP/
Everything sounds great, but there's one practical problem: how do we actually call these tools? This becomes an especially interesting problem when you want to call them live during a conference talk.
Of course, you can do it through ChatGPT or one of the publicly available extensions, but cloud-based solutions need internet access. Their interfaces aren't necessarily ideal for presentations either — when people are watching your demo on a big screen, everything should be large and easy to follow.
It's not published in the Chrome Web Store yet, but maybe one day I'll finally spend those $5 on the developer registration fee. 😅💸 For now, if you're interested, you can simply download the source and run it locally.
It's very simple. It receives the user's intent, checks the WebMCP tools available on the current page, and calls whichever ones it considers appropriate.