Much Ado About AI Pipelines: Advancing Innovation Through Proactive AI Ecosystems

AI is evolving rapidly, and you’ll quickly fall behind if you aren't staying on top of trends. At Aztek, we actively seek out the latest AI trends to enhance how we support our clients, including one of the most significant areas of innovation: AI pipelines. 

These systems combine Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, Agentic AI, and large language models (LLMs) into one or more cohesive system(s). While each of these technologies is powerful on its own, using them together can unlock new levels of automation, adaptability, and intelligence. 

While these concepts and ideas may be new to some, AI pipelines are powerful tools that offer a lot of promise whether you’re well-versed in AI or not. In this post, we’ll highlight what each element of the pipeline does, why you should use them, and what we’re already doing with them here at Aztek.

What are MCPs?

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) provides a framework for connecting AI systems with external tools and data sources. Instead of being limited to a single model's training data, MCP servers act as bridges that enable AI agents to retrieve, process, and act on fresh, domain-specific information.

A good comparison is to think of MCPs as the organs of the human body. Each server serves a specific function and goal for the whole pipeline. While some are designed to scrape the web and get data from websites, others can connect to your data sources (such as SQL Server) to leverage local company data. Together, each piece supports the overall framework so that the pipeline can thrive.

What is Agentic AI?

Unlike traditional prompt-response interactions directly with LLMs (through tools like ChatGPT and Gemini web interfaces), Agentic AI focuses on autonomous, goal-driven agents that can perform a specific set of predefined tasks with predefined actions to take when prompting an LLM. These agents can plan sequences of functions, make decisions based on intermediate results, and so on. 

Think of agents as the nervous system of the AI system pipeline. They send signals and act as interfaces to the LLM and the MCPs, moving data around in a controlled manner and ensuring that the LLM has all the necessary context to understand its defined purpose. AI agents facilitate the way that LLMs understand the context and interactions that people want out of their pipeline.

The Role of LLMs

Large Language Models remain the foundation of this ecosystem. They are the brain that provides reasoning and understanding, natural interaction through plain human language, and the flexibility to adapt to use cases and domains. Simply put, they are the key component that makes this AI pipeline system work. 

Tying It All Together

At Aztek, we've begun experimenting with how these three concepts – agentic AI, MCPs, and LLMs – can work together to achieve some impressive results. One example of our trials involves scraping website data from our own website and that of our customers to build non-traditional RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) pipelines. 

Using MCPs to facilitate data collection, our custom agent pulls this data from the MCP and passes it to the LLM. Our goal is to gain a deeper understanding of our overall website design and digital marketing approaches with different clients. So far, we have had great success!

Why AI Pipelines Matter

AI is shifting from being reactive to being proactive. By embracing MCP, Agentic AI, and LLMs together, we're building systems that:

• Reduce manual work.
• Improve accuracy by grounding responses in real data.
• Adapt to new challenges and opportunities faster.

The future of AI isn't about a single model; it's about ecosystems of models, agents, and protocols working in harmony to help improve the way we work and gain a deeper understanding of the ever-changing world of tech and marketing. These experiments are just the beginning of our journey, and we're excited to share more as we continue to experiment and learn.

At Aztek, we're laying the groundwork for that future, and we're looking forward to where it takes us. Reach out today to talk to a strategic partner who brings practical strategies and measurable results to help your business stay visible in an evolving digital world.