The rise of the agentic economy on the shoulders of MCP — Jan Curn, Apify

Channel: aiDotEngineer

Published at: 2025-07-18

YouTube video id: blW-lSd5CYQ

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blW-lSd5CYQ

[Music]
So let me start with a question. How
does intelligence emerges in biological
systems? Right? Well, it's through
neurons, right? When neurons are born,
they are just like individual cells. But
like over time, they grow their axons
and dendrites and establish connections
with other cells or other neurons and
actually learn how to communicate in
order to pursue their own interest
basically like to get nutrients and so
on. And over time they learn how to how
to communicate with each other and with
other cells to get nutrients and
basically thrive, right? And this
collective behavior if you like zoom out
and look at like really large number of
them uh is something we call
intelligence right so it's like emerging
behavior of smaller individual units
that pursue their own interest.
So how does intelligence emerge emerge
in the markets right people always talk
about markets like well market thinks
that market uh reacted to this and so on
and in some way uh markets are more
intelligent uh than like individual like
participants of the market right and
it's there are mutual uh interaction of
these individual members of the market
basically who pursue their own interest
and communicate and establish new
interactions with others
uh where some some sort of like
collective intelligence which is like
bigger than the sum of different parts
emerges right so how does intelligence
emerges uh emerge in companies well this
one is provocative through slack right
where people interact and pursue their
own interest uh in the company and over
like altogether the company well
sometimes becomes more intelligent than
the individual employees of the company
and uh so this leads to my final
question so how or how will the general
intelligence emerge in computing systems
right and there is a lot of talk about
AGI and like you know like ever larger
models uh exhibiting like super
intelligent behavior but in my opinion
the like general intelligence will
actually emerge through interaction of
multiple entities can call them agents
basically like multiple models uh
pursuing their own goals interacting
with each other and uh altogether
exhibiting something which we can call
general intelligence
and thanks to uh MCP we finally have
this uh missing part that allows the the
agents to communicate with with each
other and really like create a fabric or
agentic mesh where they can talk
together. So uh hello everyone my name
is Yan Churn. I'm the founder of API and
uh I'm going to talk about the race of
the agentic economy on the shoulders of
MCP basically economy where agents uh
can you know find counterparts uh to
interact with and purchase services from
other from businesses or tools or other
agents right so like B2A and B2B uh
sorry and A2A
all right so before I start um let me
just introduce quickly API aify is
is a marketplace of 5,000 tools called
actors and uh historically we come from
the web scraping industry right so most
of these actors are data extraction
tools that allow you you know to get
data from social media from search
engines uh data for AI for building rack
pipelines you know uh data from web uh
for lead generation and so on but also
there are other tools like data
processing tools and so on so altogether
there's about 5,000 of them and some of
them are built by API some are built by
our community of creators uh who
actually make money on it, right? So
it's like a marketplace of software
creators if you will right so actors are
self-contained piece of pieces of
software based on docker with well
definfined input and output right and
basically they represent a new way how
to ship software and publish it you know
and uh and integrate to to you know
other systems right so for example
Google map scraper it's a quite popular
actor uh from our store uh it can
extract data from Google maps right uh
more data than than the Google places
API provides right
Well, there is like creator of the
actor, description, you know, different
stats and so on. Something you would
expect from normal marketplace. And
actually,
thanks to the way actors are built, it's
actually super easy to integrate actors
from other systems, right? Right. So for
example we have SDKs for TypeScript for
Python uh for open API uh for C common
uh for CLI like we can call them from
terminal and it's only because they are
well definfined units of software with
input and output right. Uh also we have
integrations with uh workflow automation
tools like mag zapier you know clay and
many others. So to make it really easy
to call actors from these systems,
right? But obviously now uh we also have
MCP integration which makes it possible
to call actors from AI agents or you
know AI workflows. And the way it works
actually is uh the agent just needs a
API key or you know o workflow on an an
account on aifi and then through our MCP
server basically it can interact or call
any of those 5,000 actors on our
marketplace right and actually this only
became possible thanks to uh I would say
the killer feature of MCP which is the
tool discovery right actually um not
many clients didn't support this yet. Uh
but uh just just today I saw that V VS
code added support for it. Uh and
actually just like two days ago cloud
for desktop added support for tool
discovery. And basically how it works is
that um the client connects to the MCP
server and dynamically discovers tools
to use and to interact with based on the
based on the the workflow, right? And
let's say we have like 5,000 tools on
our our store and there is simply no way
we could publish all these tools through
open API because you know the context
would be just too large and like the
more tools you have the you know riskier
the result is right so we really want
like provide the tools only like uh as
needed and that is only possible through
tool discovery which I think is really
the main thing that will actually make
MCP really uh
the huge differentiator from from open
API for example, right? So MCP actually
quickly became a standard for agentic
interaction. This is Google trends data
showing that MCP is is basically
dominating the space compared to open
API or A2A from from Google, right? And
actually I think MCP already became a
standard for agenting interaction.
And it became so popular that currently
there are like you know many different
like uh registries of MCP servers that
even guys from master our friends
created like registry of MCP server
registries right just to make the sense
of it right and obviously Antropic is
also working on their own uh registry
and um I think Google's A2A they have
like a DNSbased protocol with like
well-known agents JSON way to you know
publish the the services on through DNS.
So basically there is like you know so
many different servers you can now use
from the agents right so does it mean
with like so many tools now support MCP
so does it mean like the agents can
discover and access any of them on their
own right
well not really because
to use those services your agents still
need uh to have like API tokens to those
services right so even let's say if you
use Zapier MCMCP that provides access to
like 5,000 apps they have in their
marketplace. You still need to connect
those individual apps to your services,
right? You know, like GitHub or Slack or
you know whatever. So, Zapier on the on
its own is not able to provide access to
the third party services. You still need
to as a user to facilitate that. So that
actually means that uh the agents are
not able to like find counterparts uh or
like uh other agents or other tools to
interact with on their own. They are
still depending on the human uh
developer who actually build the system,
right? Who kind of like give those those
those agents access to different tools,
right? And if those agents are, you
know, to replace all the people and all
the jobs, right? they need to be able to
uh find services to interact with. They
can't just like you know do do that like
it's like basic basic thing that like uh
anyone of us can do right like to find
service and purchase it right. So I
argue that like unless the the the
agents are able to do that uh we will
not be able to reach you know some
higher level of of intelligence of these
agentic systems and behaviors basically
uh if the agents cannot purchase
services right so how can we solve this
problem right so first like sort of like
n approach would be let the agents
subscribes themselves to the target
services right so basically in a way
like agents could have like email maybe
credit part they could like fill you
know the subscription flow maybe solve
the capture you know create an account
and so on but you see it's it's not very
practical right I mean it's you know
well they might need to also have to
phone number and so on and quite often
the services actually need to have like
real person behind the account right so
basically this this wouldn't really work
right
uh so second solution uh is central
identity and payments provider there are
like couple of companies pursuing now
that like there would be like a central
authority where you and charge money and
then the agents can use that you know to
buy services and and provide them with
their identity right for example
vertifier coinbase is now pushing their
X42 standard uh I think Stripe is
working on this and Mastercard and Visa
2 right so I think this this is going to
happen eventually but running launching
new payment system it's extremely
complicated right because you're facing
like this chicken and egg problem of
marketplaces right I think PayPal had to
uh pay like $100 million per month just
to buy the market uh and like launching
credit cards in the in the 70s was like
incredible challenge basically because
nobody was accepting those cards so why
would people use them and so on right so
I think this will happen but it will be
long process basically to establish this
right so let me offer the third approach
and it's like through a centralized
marketplace of MTP services like ampify
store basically where you just need one
API token or one authentication one
account to to get access to all the
other services and basically it works
the way that the developers who publish
these tools, these actors actually they
provide their credit card and their
account to the third party service and
basically publish it, add monetization
to it like how much does it cost to call
the service and then they are basically
the owner of the service and now they
publish it on our marketplace and
suddenly it becomes available to the
whole ecosystem of tools and this way
actually we can scale it rapidly and
actually even without the target
services knowing right so basically this
way the actor can run the code itself or
wrap an external API or just publish an
external MCP server because the MCP
servers they can be actually nested you
can have like one parent server that
provides actions or tools of the like
nested MCP servers right so that's
another like cool feature of FMCP you
can really build this sort of ecosystem
you know if you can facilitate the
payments and monetization right so
actors charges the user and then its
developer gets the money and pays for
the external service and anyone can
publish such connector even without the
target service knowing right. So time
for demo it's not live demo because the
internet uh super flaky here. So what
you can see here is clot for desktop uh
that has access to API MCP server uh
there is like 18 tools available now and
I'm asking like what is the venue of AI
engineer world's fair in San Francisco
it possible use actors so it you can see
it searches the actors
uh for a tool that can answer this
question it will find a tool or actor
called rag web browser and so it's
called it's a it's like a Google search
with you know fetch data so basically It
it asks the query like uh what is the
venue and so on and then it parses the
the resulting page. So we can see it
found like uh SF Marriott Mary's uh that
seems all correct, right? So now let's
use an actor for scraping Twitter.
So uh this actor is not available in the
context. So so the agent doesn't know
how to use it. So it will it searches
actors on our store and finds an actor
that can scrape Twitter, right? So it it
calls it calls add actor which is like a
tool that adds new tool to the context.
Uh actually cloud is very verbose
describing a lot of things about it. And
actually there is like small bug still
in cloud escope that you need to like
disable and enable a tool so that the
the tool list refreshes and then the
tools become available. I'm sure it's
going to be fixed in the next release.
And now let's use that actor to uh get
the last tweet of AI engineer
conference. All right. So it calls the
actor on aify. Uh it knows the the
Twitter handle probably from from the
from the website. And now you can see
that uh it found the result and the last
tweet from this morning was uh something
about workshops. That seems about right.
So now what? So we we have we have seen
how we can use existing tools in in in
our store. But like let's say uh uh one
of our competitors uh company called
browser base. Hey Paul if you're here uh
they certainly haven't published you
know uh an actor in our store but we
did. So we created an account browser
base, added our API token there and
published like basically their MCP
server on our store without actually
them even knowing. And now anybody can
actually use browserbased MCP through
API's ecosystem, right? Even without
them having to do anything or knowing
about it, right? So now let's use
browser base to fill in the email
subscription form on the AI engineer
website.
fill email uh yanappify.com
and now let's see what happens right and
actually we'll see that uh that the that
the agent will actually call
browserbased MCP through you know an
actor publish published you know by us
on our oni store and perform the actions
on the web right and actually this way
we can easily like uh bring a lot of lot
of existing MCP servers to our store and
you know expand the ecosystem rapidly
without you know having to ask for for
you cooperation of the third parties.
Right? So that's actually what we're
doing now. Uh we want to scale this
marketplace rapidly and now okay so now
it's evaluating you know the screenshots
looking for the field and so on you know
and eventually it will manage to uh fill
the form and and basically succeed in
the task. Right? I can maybe skip this
uh to save time. It takes some some some
time to basically
uh for the agent to to find the form and
so on. But uh yeah,
it succeeded. It completed the email sub
subscription. And
this way you basically see that uh you
can plug
our our ecosystem of actors into into uh
any AI agents that actually support tool
discovery. Right. All right. And
so this means now anyone can publish
tools or you know agents on aify store
and monetize them and immediately get
access you know to all the AI clients
that already like integrated appy and
all the ecosystem of tools right and
actually people can make make money on
it like just last month we paid more
than4 million dollars to our creators
and actually the the this number is is
growing. rapidly. You know, overall the
actors generate more than one half
million dollars per month. Now, uh we
have like 1 million monthly visitors to
the whole ecosystem. And now we're
really in the process of like scaling
this ecosystem. So, um if you're looking
for ways to monetize your tools or
agents, you know, just um talk to us and
publish or notify store and get access
to this ecosystem of developers and this
visibility.
And there are some open questions
obviously uh that remain. So will this
autonomous through discovery provide
real value? I mean like everybody who
builds agentic systems knows that you
know like making sure that the system
works as expected is tricky right even
if it's fixed. So if we add this like
you know variables that like well uh if
the agents can discover new tools uh
will it actually work? Well, currently
it might it might be a bit flaky, right?
I think we're still still we we're still
fairly early, but as the models get
better,
I think uh even with the discovery,
suddenly the the the agents will be will
be able to provide you know valuable and
reliable result basically right so this
is this remains to be seen but I'm
optimistic that like as the LMS will get
better we'll actually get there that the
two discovery will actually provide real
value. Well, there's a big question of
like how can agents trust tools or other
tools? Oh, so sorry. Or each other,
right? We know it like you only interact
with people you trust. So, how can
agents do that? We'll see. And can
autonomous agent interaction enable AGI?
Well, we'll see. Thank you very much for
your attention and uh feel free to try
it. MCP.I.com.
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