Descriptions:
Ido Salomon (creator of MCPUI and maintainer of MCP Apps) and Liad Yosef (co-founder of ALabs and co-creator of the MCP app spec) present at AI Engineer on the standardization of MCP Apps — the first official extension to the Model Context Protocol, developed in partnership with Anthropic and OpenAI. The standard allows companies like Shopify, Hugging Face, Amazon, and Booking.com to embed branded, interactive UI components directly inside AI chat interfaces, replacing plain-text tool responses with rich, clickable widgets that preserve company identity and UX expertise.
The core technical architecture enables bidirectional communication: an MCP server returns a sandboxed React component alongside its tool call response, and user interactions within that UI propagate back to the model as events — triggering follow-up tool calls or messages without additional user input. Shopify has been sending MCP UI chunks to millions of storefronts for over a year; adoption now spans VS Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT (which recommends MCP Apps as the standard way to build ChatGPT integrations), Claude, Postman, Goose, and Pi.
The presenters frame MCP Apps as more than a UI enhancement — it represents a structural shift in how the web operates, where users complete complex multi-service workflows (booking venues, purchasing products, managing calendars) inside a single assistant interface. Each service retains its visual identity and interaction design rather than being reduced to a faceless data API, creating what the speakers describe as a win-win-win for users, service providers, and AI hosts alike.
📺 Source: AI Engineer · Published May 06, 2026
🏷️ Format: Keynote Launch
