Slide is Living in the MCP Future

A recently shipped tool that lets MSPs use Anthropic’s Claude as an administrative interface is an early example of a likely trend.

My last post included a prediction, based on a conversation with Elliott Hyman of Lyra Technology Group, that someday in the future managed services software could look a lot more like genAI chatbots than the often complex GUIs technicians use today.

I suppose I should have guessed that Austin McChord, data protection vendor Slide’s chairman and co-founder, is living in that future today.

Very quietly and not long ago, Slide shipped an MCP-based tool (coded by McChord himself) that lets MSPs use Anthropic’s Claude as the administrative interface for the vendor’s data protection platform, and I got a demo of the system in Slide’s booth at GTIA’s ChannelCon event in Nashville last week. Want to see which clients you’re protecting? Just ask.

Want the RDP bookmark for a virtual machine? Your wish is Claude’s command.

This is the first time I’ve seen something like this in production, but it won’t be the last. Rewst, Keeper Security, 1Password, and Pax8 among others have all rolled out MCP servers just within the last few weeks. More will follow for sure, and it won’t be long before people start using them to create AI interfaces like Slide’s. Those tools won’t steal anyone’s job, but they will make technicians more productive and turn mastering a new UI into a thing of the past. I expect to see a lot of them.