Everyone’s talking about MCP. Fewer people are talking about what it costs you when you choose the wrong pattern for the job–in performance, in security, and in complexity.
As MCP adoption accelerates, enterprise teams are being asked to make consequential architectural decisions without a clear framework for making them. Do you build on your existing indexed knowledge infrastructure? Shift to live agent calls via MCP servers? Do both? The honest answer is: it depends. And the trade-offs are ones most MCP conversations don’t acknowledge.
In this session, BA Insight’s technical team breaks down both patterns with candor about where each one excels and where each one struggles. No hype. No handwaving. Just a practical framework for getting the architecture right.
Attendees will learn:
- When to index, when to agent, and when to do both — a decision framework built around cost, performance at scale, and the critical difference between repeated and one-off use cases
- Why personalization and tuning behave differently in an MCP context than in an enriched index — and what that means for the quality of your AI outputs
- How information security and permissions work across both patterns — including where each model introduces risk and where it provides natural controls
- Why the hybrid model isn’t a hedge — it’s the pragmatic default for most enterprise environments, and how to make it work without rebuilding your stack
The reframe on MCP: MCP isn’t the new connector. It’s another source in a broader architecture. Understanding that distinction will change how you evaluate everything else.
This session is designed for enterprise architects, IT leaders, and technical decision-makers navigating AI infrastructure decisions.
