Monthly Dispatch: May 2026

Issue No. 1May 15, 20266 min read

Welcome to the first Plexara Monthly Dispatch. Here is what shipped this month, what is worth reading, and one tip we keep coming back to.

What is new this month

Plexara already exposes your data behind a single MCP endpoint through its built-in stack: DataHub for the catalog, Trino for federated SQL across your databases, S3 for object storage, plus knowledge capture, persistent memory, personas, and audit. The two gateway features shipping this month extend that envelope outward, so an agent connected to Plexara can also reach anything else that speaks MCP or HTTP without leaving Plexara's governance.

MCP Gateway features are stable

Now GA

The MCP Gateway brings any well-behaved third-party MCP server into the Plexara envelope. Operators add a connection through the admin portal with encrypted credential storage, and the remote server's tools surface to your agents under a namespaced pattern, connection then remote tool, subject to the same authentication, persona-based visibility, and audit pipeline as Plexara's native toolkits. When upstream connections are added, removed, or re-authenticated, downstream clients receive a tools-list-changed notification over the live SSE channel, so the agent's tool inventory updates without a reconnect.

The piece we are most pleased to ship at GA is declarative cross-enrichment for proxied responses. A vendor MCP tool result can be joined inline with a Trino query or DataHub lookup, so the response returns with its own data plus your warehouse context in a single call. That puts less pressure on the human and the agent to determine what and how to correlate; integrating an external MCP automatically infers its relationship to your existing enterprise data and capabilities.

For practitioners, existing MCP investments (internal servers, vendor MCPs, anything your team has already wired up) become first-class Plexara tools without a rewrite. For managers, it means one governed surface across every MCP the organization deploys: one audit trail, one persona model, one place to grant or revoke access. After several months of production use with clients, the MCP Gateway is moving from preview to general availability.

API Gateway features are in beta

In beta

The API Gateway does the same job for REST and GraphQL endpoints. Any HTTP service your team already operates (internal APIs, SaaS platforms, partner endpoints, legacy systems sitting behind an OpenAPI spec) becomes an MCP-callable tool the agent can invoke alongside Trino, DataHub, and S3. Same authentication, same persona-based visibility, same audit trail, same cross-enrichment hooks available to native toolkits.

The reason this matters: most enterprise capability is not behind an MCP server today, but behind a REST API. Until those endpoints can be reached by the agent under the same governance Plexara applies to everything else, letting the agent use your systems stays a project. The API Gateway collapses that project into a configuration.

We are looking for design partners. If your team has an internal service worth exposing or a third-party API the agent should be able to call, start a conversation and we will get you onto the beta.

From the Learning section

We publish to the Learning section on a regular cadence, mixing concept primers, applied Plexara walkthroughs, and dated field notes. Three pieces from recent weeks are worth your time.

Why proximity matters: tools, meaning, and memory belong together

May 9, 2026

The clearest single-article statement of why we built Plexara the way we did. When tools, business meaning, and memory live in separate products, the agent pays a latency and hallucination tax, stitching them back together at every turn. When they live in one envelope, the agent reasons about your business with the context already present.

The context gap in AI data access

April 22, 2026

The schema-only view of a database is what most AI integrations give an agent today, and it is not enough. This piece walks through the BIRD benchmark evidence, references the Gartner forecast that 60% of MCP-only agentic analytics projects will fail by 2028 without semantic enrichment, and shows side by side what a tool response looks like with and without catalog metadata traveling alongside it.

Token efficiency in enterprise MCP deployments

February 25, 2026

The ROI piece. Persona-based tool filtering alone removed roughly 380,000 tokens from a typical 20-exchange session in one of our production deployments, and total per-session cost reductions landed in the 40 to 60% range. If you are tracking AI spend on a per-team basis, and increasingly finance teams are, this is the math.

New to the platform? Start with 201, Anatomy of a Plexara MCP and read forward through the 200-series. Ten articles, one tour of the whole system.

Usage tip: capture the workflow, not just the output

You worked with Plexara to build a quarterly receiving report, a campaign activation dashboard, a customer cohort export. The output is in hand. Before you close the tab, ask Plexara to save the workflow as a reusable prompt using the Manage Prompts tool.

In Claude, or any MCP client, the ask is as simple as:

Use the Manage Prompts tool to take what we just did and save it as a reusable prompt called "Quarterly Receiving Report" so my team can run it next quarter against any department.

Plexara writes the prompt, parameterizes the variables (location, quarter, format), and adds it to the library under whatever scope you choose: personal, persona, or org-wide. Next time, anyone authorized invokes it as a slash command and gets the same rigorous result without rebuilding the reasoning from scratch.

Two reasons this matters more than it looks:

For practitioners. The first run of a complex analytical workflow takes real thought. The tenth run should not. Reusable prompts turn one expert's careful conversation into a button anyone authorized can press.
For managers. Prompts are the new SOPs. A curated library is institutional knowledge that survives turnover, accelerates onboarding, and gives you a versioned, auditable record of how your team produces its work.

Full walkthrough in 208, MCP Prompts: reusable prompts.

Worth reading from others

Four pieces from this year that frame why MCP, and the work around it, matter right now.

Why Model Context Protocol is suddenly on every executive agenda

CIO, February 24, 2026

A clean executive-level read on why MCP has moved from engineering curiosity to boardroom topic in roughly a year. Frames MCP as the connective infrastructure for enterprise AI, walks through where it is already in use (often without leadership knowing), and is realistic about the governance and security work that has to happen in parallel. Hand this to any executive who keeps asking what this MCP thing is and why it keeps coming up.

The 2026 MCP Roadmap

Model Context Protocol blog, March 9, 2026

The official roadmap from MCP's lead maintainer, laying out 2026 priorities: transport scalability, agent-to-agent communication, governance maturation, and enterprise readiness. Notable for what it admits, that production deployments have surfaced a predictable set of enterprise pain points (audit trails, SSO-integrated auth, gateway behavior, configuration portability), and that the protocol's evolution will reflect that. Required reading for anyone planning around MCP in the next twelve months.

Building a strong data infrastructure for AI agent success

MIT Technology Review Insights, March 10, 2026

The argument we wish we had written. More than two-thirds of companies cite data silos as a top adoption challenge, more than half manage upwards of a thousand data sources, and only four in ten believe their data is ready for AI (down from the year prior). The piece's conclusion: the ceiling on agentic AI is set by enterprise data architecture, not by model capability.

State of AI trust in 2026: Shifting to the agentic era

McKinsey & Company, March 25, 2026

McKinsey's 2026 AI Trust Maturity Survey of roughly 500 organizations. The headline finding for our purposes: as agents take on more autonomy, only about a third of organizations report maturity of three or higher in strategy, governance, and agentic AI governance. Technical capability is outpacing the controls that make it safe to deploy, which is exactly the gap Plexara's persona-based access, execution-time enforcement, and unified audit trail are built to close.

We read every reply. If something here was useful, or wasn't, tell us. If you have a use case for the API Gateway beta, send it our way. If there is a topic you would like us to take on in a future Dispatch, we are listening.

Thank you for being early.

The Plexara team