Ask ChatGPT First: AI Assistants Are Becoming a New Business Channel
At AGNTCon + MCPCon Europe, Cyrille Vidal from Alpic AI presented a compelling thesis: with MCP already running in production, AI assistants are becoming a new channel — an acquisition channel for consumer brands and a way to give enterprise customers a better, AI-native way to use products.
The MCP Effect on Customer Engagement
The shift is happening faster than most companies realize. At AGNTCon, the message was clear: MCP’s stateless architecture and enterprise-ready authorization (announced with the latest spec update) means businesses can now deploy AI assistants that reliably connect to their backend systems — and their customers’ data.
Vidal walked through several live examples:
Consumer Brands: PGA of America, AirHelp, Novasol, Facile.it
These companies are seeing traffic come through AI assistants as a discovery and booking channel:
- PGA of America — golf course booking via ChatGPT, with availability synced in real-time through MCP
- AirHelp — flight compensation claims processed through AI assistants, reducing the funnel from 8 form fields to a 2-sentence conversation
- Novasol — vacation rental bookings through AI assistants, with property data, pricing, and availability all served via MCP endpoints
- Facile.it — insurance comparisons done entirely through conversational AI, with real-time quote generation
B2B SaaS: Touchstream
For B2B SaaS, the value proposition is different but equally powerful: give your existing enterprise customers a better, AI-native way to use your product.
Touchstream, a media monitoring platform, integrated MCP to allow enterprise customers to query their media databases through natural language: “Show me all mentions of our brand in gaming publications last quarter” — the AI assistant handles the complex multi-parameter search and returns structured results.
Why This Matters Now
Three factors have converged:
- MCP production readiness — 81% of agentic AI systems are already in production, and MCP is the most adopted standard (89%)
- Stateless architecture — the new MCP spec removes the scaling bottlenecks that prevented production deployment
- Enterprise authorization — formal deprecation policies and enterprise-grade security make it viable for customer-facing applications
The Channel Shift
What’s happening mirrors the mobile app revolution of the early 2010s. Just as companies raced to build mobile apps when smartphones became ubiquitous, they’re now racing to make their services discoverable and usable through AI assistants — because that’s where their customers are starting their journeys.
As Vidal put it: “When was the last time you searched for a flight on a website directly? You asked ChatGPT first. The same shift is happening for every category — and MCP is the protocol that makes it work.”
