Avaya Advances Model Context Protocol (MCP) Support for Avaya Infinity, Raising the Bar for its Customers
As organizations strive to differentiate themselves from competitors, Avaya offers modern technology to transform the customer experience piece of this puzzle. Effectively harnessing AI to offer greater flexibility, choice and speed of adoption will be key to staying ahead of the rapidly changing customer experience demand curve.
Avaya announced the integration of Model Context Protocol (MCP) into its Avaya Infinity platform. MCP is a new, open interoperability standard that fosters the creation of AI assistants by empowering Large Language Models to securely connect with and use external tools, data sources, and real-world context. MCP enables AI systems to learn from and modify the real world through seamless connections with a wide variety of software applications. It replaces a fragmented landscape of custom-coded, brittle API integrations with one open and standard protocol.
As part of this announcement, Avaya is partnering with data and AI company Databricks to bring enterprise-grade governance and data privacy to the MCP implementation. Enterprise customers can confidently deploy AI tools with fine-grained access control, audit logging, and seamless integration across structured and unstructured data sources, leveraging the best-in-class Databricks platform.
This aligns with Avaya’s ongoing strategy of integrating powerful, future-proof technologies while maintaining openness, flexibility, and scalability. Avaya Infinity with MCP empowers AI to deliver value beyond expectations of the business, driving more successful outcomes. Our collaboration with best-of-breed partners such as Databricks underscores this commitment.
Positive Momentum Around Agentic AI
Since announcing MCP support for Avaya Infinity, I’ve had the opportunity to engage with customers, partners, and industry watchers, and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. There’s a shared sense of excitement around how rapidly Agentic AI has emerged, and how it has started to deliver concrete and meaningful business value. There is also a keen awareness that Agentic AI cannot do it all in the contact center. There are plenty of proven use cases where AI delivers a better experience, but the value really explodes when humans and AI interoperate in a harmonious cycle. This is the notion that our CEO, Patrick Dennis, has recently coined tandem care, a new model of service where AI agents and human agents collaborate in real time, each amplifying the strengths of the other.
At the same time, we’ve seen a growing contrast in the market. In the weeks following our announcement, other vendors have doubled down on proprietary architecture and walled-garden strategies. This divergence reinforces the importance of open standards and customer choice, especially as the industry transitions toward a new era of AI-enabled, real-time orchestration.
How MCP Enables the Next-Generation Contact Center
MCP transforms the role of AI in the contact center from a simple chatbot to a powerful, context-aware copilot for both consumers and human agents.
MCP also lays the foundation for tandem care. With MCP, AI assistants don’t just answer questions, they can anticipate needs, surface insights, and quietly support the human agent throughout the interaction. It’s a shift from automation to augmentation, and it’s unlocking a new tier of intelligent, high-touch support.
And MCP has a democratizing effect—meaningful AI is no longer the domain of developers and data scientists. Contact center administrators are now able to configure dynamic, context-aware workflows that replace rigid, hard-coded scripts. Business users can select which LLMs to use and define their own rules without requiring a developer.
Real-World Scenarios
Here are a few examples of MCP in healthcare and financial services:
Ensuring Patient Journey Continuity
Healthcare demands accurate data, full patient context, and compliance with HIPAA and other standards. MCP enables AI orchestration across fragmented systems to deliver coordinated, personalized care. Imagine a smart watch acting as an MCP Server – an LLM empowered with a patient’s vital statistics in real time. Talk about hyper-personalization!
Real-Time Transaction Context
In financial services, MCP provides audit-ready, real-time context for fraud detection and service personalization. Agentic AI can be empowered with a host of MCP Tools to assess real-time risk and select the best series of authentication measures needed in the moment.
Open Standards vs. Walled Gardens
The emergence of MCP has brought a clear divide in the contact center industry between those investing in open, interoperable ecosystems and those protecting closed, proprietary stacks.
Avaya is committed to open systems and best-in-breed interoperability. We believe the future of AI lies in collaboration, extensibility, and trust - not vendor lock-in. The power of MCP isn’t just in its technical design; it’s in what it enables across an ecosystem of partners, providers, and platforms.
The Strategic Implications Are Clear
Avaya Infinity is more than an AI-powered orchestration platform—it is a springboard for what's next. Combined with MCP, it gives our enterprise users the tools they need to deliver high-impact business outcomes in real-time, without proprietary AI lock-in.
If you are interested in more MCP content, I recently had the opportunity to discuss our announcement in depth with Avaya’s CEO Patrick Dennis.