Microsoft Copilot

MCP UI: Extending the frontier — Liad Yosef and Ido Salomon, MCP Apps

May 6, 2026 · 22:21

In this episode, Ido Salomon and Liad Yosef explain MCP Apps, an MCP extension that lets tools send interactive, branded UI instead of plain text responses inside chat hosts like ChatGPT, Claude, VS Code, Cursor, and Copilot. They argue that text-based chat reduces companies to a wall of text, erasing identity, while MCP Apps preserves branding by returning HTML resources that hosts render as secure, interactive components. The architecture ensures every user click sends a message back to the host (not directly to the backend), keeping interactions in context—as demonstrated with a PostHog funnel analysis in Claude. Adoption includes Shopify, Hugging Face, GitHub, ChatGPT, and Claude, with ChatGPT recommending MCP Apps for building ChatGPT Apps. They note 800 million weekly ChatGPT users (10% of world population), calling this a once-in-20-years opportunity to rethink app distribution. Future work covers reusable views, model-UI interaction, and interoperability with generative UI protocols like A2UI and WebMCP, aiming to standardize UI in chat as the new web.

Forget RAG Pipelines—Build Production Ready Agents in 15 Mins: Nina Lopatina, Rajiv Shah, Contextual

Jun 27, 2025 · 1:15:43

Rajiv Shah, Nina Lopatina, and Matthew from Contextual AI demonstrate how developers can build production-ready RAG agents in minutes using Contextual AI's managed RAG platform, emphasizing that RAG should be treated as a managed service to avoid reinventing infrastructure. They walk through ingesting documents like NVIDIA financials and spurious correlation reports, then querying the agent with questions requiring quantitative reasoning across tables. The platform handles extraction, layout analysis, image captioning, hybrid retrieval, and a state-of-the-art reranker, capped by a grounded language model that avoids hallucinations and provides attribution. Evaluation is done via LM Unit, a model-as-judge that scores responses on criteria like accuracy and causation. The episode also shows integrating the agent with Claude Desktop via MCP and answers audience questions on pricing (consumption-based with a $25 credit), scalability, entitlements, HIPAA, and domain-specific language.