# What is MCP? An overview of the Model Context Protocol
Source: https://speakeasy.com/mcp/core-concepts

The AI ecosystem has evolved so much that today's LLMs are no longer just completion engines. Coupled with an interface, LLMs can become clients capable of taking actions, querying systems, and interpreting structured content.

In modern architectures, LLMs often operate alongside databases, APIs, or custom functions. To support this, developers frequently inject external data directly into their prompts. The simplest way to do this is to pull data from a service and pass it as plain text to the model:

```python
import requests
from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI()