What is MCP?

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard that lets AI assistants talk to other software through a shared interface. Anthropic published it in late 2024. OpenAI, Cursor, and others adopted it through 2025. By 2026 it's the closest thing the AI world has to a USB port.

For Jasning, MCP is the difference between an AI that talks about your dispatch board and one that operates it.

What MCP gives the AI

Three things.

A list of tools

The MCP server tells the assistant what it can do. For Jasning that's ten tools: list, create, and update for appointments, customers, and the queue, plus availability-suggest and read-only access to drivers. See the tool reference.

Permission to use them

The assistant doesn't just see tool names. It can call them. Each call is a real request to Jasning, returns real data, and changes real state.

Auth that's already done

You connect once through OAuth. After that the assistant is authorized to act on your behalf inside the scope you granted. No API keys to copy. No tokens to rotate manually.

What it's not

Not a model. MCP is plumbing, not intelligence. Claude is still Claude. ChatGPT is still ChatGPT. MCP just gives them hands.

Not a chat protocol. You don't talk to MCP. You talk to your assistant. The assistant talks to Jasning over MCP.

Not specific to Anthropic. Despite where it came from, MCP is an open spec. Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and every serious AI tooling vendor speaks it. If you switch from Claude to ChatGPT next month, your Jasning connection moves with you.

What changed when this protocol shipped

Before MCP, every AI integration was bespoke. To connect ChatGPT to a dispatch tool, someone had to write a Custom GPT, or expose a REST API, or build a plugin. Each shape was different. Each vendor pair was a separate engineering project.

MCP turns "integration" into "configuration". A dispatch tool publishes an MCP server. Any MCP-aware AI client can connect to it. Same shape, every time.

For us at Jasning, the practical effect is that we ship one server and your assistant of choice can drive it.

How Jasning uses MCP

The MCP server lives at https://jasning.com/mcp. It speaks the streamable-HTTP transport, authenticates with OAuth 2.1 + PKCE, and is scoped to your account. Every tool call is automatically restricted to your data; there is no way for one account's assistant to see another's records.

Once connected, you can ask things like:

Plan tomorrow.
Move all of Friday to Monday.
Who is closest to Aalter right now?
Pull the next three queue items.

The assistant reads the right context, calls the right tools, and the board updates. The prompt patterns doc has more.

Should I care if I'm not technical?

MCP is technically a protocol. Practically it's the thing that makes "tell Claude to plan tomorrow" actually work. You don't need to understand the spec to use Jasning, the same way you don't need to understand HTTP to read this page. But knowing it exists explains why your assistant suddenly got useful.