Rearchitecting media and entertainment customer experience for the MCP generation

AI is transforming how media and entertainment companies engage audiences, support subscribers, empower employees, and operate across increasingly complex content and technology environments. But one question stands above the rest: Who controls the future of your audience and employee experiences, your organization or your technology vendors?

At Avaya, we believe the answer should be you. That is why we are embracing the open future of AI, building the Avaya Infinity® platform to support Model Context Protocol (MCP).

It is the right move for media and entertainment organizations that need to innovate without abandoning trusted systems, audience data, content workflows, established operations, or the security and governance requirements that protect customers, creators, intellectual property, and the brand.

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For too long, bringing AI into media and entertainment customer experience has meant choosing between two difficult options:

• Lock in to a single provider's closed ecosystem, limiting flexibility as AI models, audience expectations, business models, content strategies, and digital platforms evolve.
• Create costly, one-off integrations across subscriber management, CRM, streaming platforms, content management, advertising systems, billing, identity, knowledge bases, analytics, and other applications.

This false choice slows innovation and places additional pressure on already complex media technology environments. It can also fragment the audience experience when information is distributed across streaming services, apps, websites, contact centers, advertising platforms, live experiences, and legacy and modern systems.

Enter MCP, an open, vendor-agnostic standard designed to help AI models interact with tools, data, and operational logic securely and at scale.

Think of MCP as a universal connection layer for AI. Instead of building a different connection between every model and every media system, organizations can create a standardized way for approved AI capabilities to access the context and tools they need.

As the AI ecosystem evolves, this approach can give media and entertainment companies greater freedom to innovate while maintaining control over the systems, data, workflows, content, and audience relationships that differentiate their brands.

MCP enables AI systems to operate with dynamic awareness of audience, subscriber, employee, session, content, account, and service context.

For Avaya Infinity, this means AI models can deliver experiences informed by relevant information across complex media and entertainment environments. A subscriber interaction could draw upon approved account, billing, viewing, CRM, entitlement, knowledge, and interaction data while respecting the permissions governing each source.

That level of contextual intelligence can be especially valuable for media companies managing millions of viewers, subscribers, fans, creators, advertisers, content assets, digital interactions, and service relationships across multiple brands and channels.

A typical media or entertainment organization may have dozens or hundreds of tools and data sources, including subscriber management platforms, CRM, streaming systems, content management, digital asset management, advertising technology, billing, identity services, knowledge bases, analytics environments, and workforce applications. At the same time, multiple AI models, copilots, applications, and agents may need controlled access to those systems.

Before MCP, connecting each system to each AI model could require its own point-to-point integration. As the number of systems and AI capabilities grows, so does the development effort, maintenance burden, complexity, and technical debt. MCP changes that paradigm by introducing a standardized intermediary layer. Instead of solving an increasingly complex N x M integration problem, media and entertainment companies can move toward a more scalable N + M model.

Each approved enterprise tool can expose capabilities through an MCP server, while AI models and applications connect through MCP clients. Once components can communicate through MCP, media and entertainment organizations gain a more flexible foundation for connecting AI with existing and future systems.

That can dramatically reduce redundant integration work while protecting investments already made in the technologies, platforms, content operations, and workflows that support audiences today. This matters because media customer journeys rarely live in one application. A single interaction may touch communications, streaming, CRM, subscriptions, billing, identity, entitlements, content systems, advertising, knowledge, and analytics.

Avaya Infinity with MCP can help connect those technologies, insights, channels, and workflows so media companies can modernize the experience without requiring the entire technology environment to be replaced first.

With MCP, Avaya Infinity users can unlock deeper business value by giving AI access to more relevant context and approved enterprise capabilities.

For media and entertainment organizations, that can mean faster subscriber support, more personalized audience engagement, more efficient account and billing assistance, stronger fan experiences, greater employee productivity, and better continuity across digital and service journeys.

MCP creates the foundation for generative and agentic AI that is not simply intelligent, but situationally aware of the viewer, subscriber, account, content preferences, entitlement, service history, and permissions surrounding an interaction.