Analyst Firm MCPs: Does your BUYER care?

The analyst firms are shipping AI access. IDC has an MCP server. Forrester too. Gartner might not quite have an MCP yet, but there’s an AI bot behind the paywall, and I’d be surprised if they don’t go that direction too.

I see the prolific AR minds speculating that this may be the thing that saves the industry. And the AR pros wondering how their game has to change now. I’ve been reading both takes for months.

But when anything new shows up in this industry, I start in the same place every time. Does my BUYER care?

And when I sit with that question in this case, I don’t see much changing…

It’s a user experience upgrade, and a real one. Research shows up in the flow of my work instead of behind a login. I don’t have to go somewhere else and remember my password and dig around. It’s definitely possible that existing users read marginally more research because it’s right there.

You can imagine you’re working on a slide or something and you think “I wonder if Gartner has a stat on that” and you can pull one right up without leaving Powerpoint. That’s not nothing.

But here’s what stops this from changing the game: Every one of these models still requires a license.

Same people, accessing the same research, through a fancy new door. If I was already paying for a seat, I was already using it. Nobody holds a five figure research license and never logs in. And if I wasn’t paying for a seat already, the fact that the research is available via MCP now doesn’t make me start.

My hunch about what software buyers actually do is simpler than any of this, at least when they are considering purchases. They download what they need and they put it in their own internal, shared model, alongside everything else they’re already working with. That’s where their context lives.

So I keep landing in the same spot. An MCP just means the same people are accessing research in a new way. Enjoy your new, convenient access, and know that the exact same people who had research access yesterday also have it two clicks faster today.

What would change my mind is specific: A company-wide license. Something where a large enterprise buys access once, pipes it into whatever their people already use, and everybody making a decision suddenly has it. That would put analyst research in front of new eyeballs.

Of course, it would also cannibalize the seat model these firms have sold forever, which is presumably why nobody has done it.

Call me when the licensing changes. Until then, I don’t think anything else really has.

Up, and to the Right,
Elena