AI agents are being sold as the solution for planning trips, answering business questions, and solving problems of all kinds, but getting them to work with tools and data outside their chat interfaces has been tricky. Developers have to patch together various connectors and keep them running, but that's a fragile approach that's hard to scale and creates governance headaches. At launch, Google is starting with MCP servers for Maps, BigQuery, Compute Engine, and Kubernetes Engine. In practice, this might look like an analytics assistant querying BigQuery directly, or an ops agent interacting with infrastructure services. In the case of Maps, Giannini said, without the MCP, developers would rely on the model's built-in knowledge. 'But by giving your agent ['] a tool like the Google Maps MCP server, then it gets grounded on actual, up-to-date location information for places or trips planning,' he added. While the MCP servers will eventually be offered across all of Google's tools, they...
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