If you've read anything about TaskMate you've seen the phrase “MCP tool”, probably without much explanation. It's worth five minutes, because the idea is simpler than the acronym suggests and it explains why your tools aren't trapped inside our product.
The problem it solves
AI systems are useful when they can do things, not just talk. Doing things means calling software — looking up a record, sending an email, checking a portal. For that to work, the AI needs a description of what's available: what the thing is called, what you have to give it, what it gives back.
Before there was a standard, everyone invented their own way of writing that description. Which meant a tool built for one system was useless in another. MCP — the Model Context Protocol — is the agreed format for those descriptions.
What a tool actually is
Strip away the protocol and a tool is three things:
- A name and a description. “check_gst_filing_status — looks up the current filing status for a registration number.”
- Inputs. What you have to supply. Here, a registration number.
- Outputs. What comes back. A status, a date, maybe a downloadable acknowledgement.
That's it. The interesting part isn't the format, it's the consequence: anything that can produce that description can be called by anything that understands it.
Where TaskMate fits
When you record yourself doing something on a portal, or describe it in a sentence, TaskMate turns that into exactly this kind of tool. You choose which parts are inputs — the registration number changes each time, the URL doesn't. You choose what comes back out.
Two things follow from that. First, your tools compose: a task can chain a tool you recorded this morning with a third-party MCP tool for your CRM and a built-in utility for spreadsheets, because all three describe themselves the same way. Second, what you build isn't locked to us — it's a tool in a standard format, which is the point of using a standard.
Why we didn't invent our own
We could have. It would have been slightly easier in month one and considerably worse by month twelve. Every tool anyone builds on a proprietary format is a tool that only works in one place, and every business we talk to already has enough of those.
Written by the Deccan Logic team. More posts · Try TaskMate free