The market narrative around MCP has settled on a clean conclusion.
MCP can connect to any data source. Therefore, centralized platforms like Databricks and Snowflake become legacy infrastructure. Agents reach out, pull what they need, and act. The data warehouse is yesterday’s pattern.
It’s a compelling argument. It misses the layer underneath.
Humans Browse. Agents Don’t.
The reason people believe MCP replaces consolidation is that they’re still thinking about agents the way they think about people.
A human analyst navigating fragmented data sources has something no agent has: a brain that synthesizes on the fly. They flip between tabs. They hold context across seven browser windows. They notice the discrepancy between what Salesforce says and what the spreadsheet says and they resolve it in the moment, silently, without a protocol.
Agents cannot do that. An agent needs the data ready before it can move. Clean, consolidated, governed, and accessible. Not scattered across 47 sources with inconsistent schemas and stale timestamps.
Connecting an agent to 47 fragmented sources via MCP gives you 47 fragmented sources with a better protocol on top. The fragmentation doesn’t disappear; it just gets a cleaner interface.
The Token Problem Makes This Concrete
There’s a technical signal that confirms the structural argument.
MCP burns tokens. Heavily. When an agent queries broadly across disconnected sources, the cost compounds fast; authentication overhead, redundant calls, reconciliation work the agent has to do because the data wasn’t clean to begin with. Engineers who work with MCP in production notice this immediately.
That inefficiency isn’t a bug in MCP. It’s a signal about fragmentation. The more scattered the data, the more work the agent does before it can act. Consolidation reduces that overhead directly. A well-governed warehouse means fewer calls, cleaner results, and an agent that spends its tokens on action rather than reconciliation.
The Highway Still Needs Cities
MCP is a protocol. Protocols move things. They don’t store them, govern them, or make them trustworthy.
Think of MCP as the highway and Databricks or Snowflake as the cities the highway connects. Better roads don’t make cities obsolete. They make well-built cities more valuable; easier to reach, more worth connecting to.
The agentic world runs on data it can trust. Platforms that consolidate, govern, and structure that data aren’t being displaced by MCP. They’re becoming the foundation MCP depends on.
Consolidate first. Connect second. The protocol is not the strategy.