Is MCP the future to integrate Travel Risk data?

Integrated travel risk solutions has been hard ... until now?

Is the future of travel risk integrated data to be found through MCP?

As the world of AI matures, the framework in how AI solutions 'find' and 'enact' with tools and data sources may well standardise around MCP (or whatever that evolves into). MCP stands for 'Model Context Protocol' and it provides a mechanism for solutions to discover, comprehend and use 'tools'. Part of the MCP framework is how an AI knows what the tool itself does ... so that may include things such as querying or performing a task. You can argue that APIs today already provide this, but so often these are proprietary and rely on bespoke integration.

In the context to travel risk, this open framework brings some possible uses to mind that might pose competition for many current travel risk solutions...

• Discovering and integrating disparate sources of location, environment, corporate facility and situation information associated with assessments, advisories and forecasts. Producing a more organic risk register?

• Analysing risk assessments from multiple providers, then analysing and forming a more informed result not limited to a single point of view ... optionally keeping humans in the loop?

• Personalising risk from profile data with multiple risk data sources to provide more targeted and engaging experience of advice and assessments ... given privacy constraints of course!

• Collating current and ongoing situational awareness for incidents. Whether managing internally or transferring it to an assistance provider to maintain a consistent point of view.

• Aggregating people tracking data and calculating event impact, by pulling location data from mixed solutions and understanding current and situational risks in context to an incident.

• Providing status reports for leadership by extracting data from various risk solutions and producing a single consistent point of view (the single pane of glass everyone thinks they produce today).

• Running frequent and complex test scenarios based off the list above and reviewing outcomes against controls and mitigations outlined in policy, checking for blind-spots, test for compliance etc.

Having a standardised framework in place means there will be considerably more flexibility and power beyond what travel risk solutions have offered for the last decade (or more). This may or will challenge many travel risk management vendors to ensure they continue to add value beyond what an MCP framework could do instead?

The near and long term tests will be how comfortable we will be to automate this ... versus ensuring a human is always in the loop ... !? Reach out to us if you want to know more or wish to chat on the subject in more depth.