An Introduction to AI Hub, Part 2: Custom MCP Servers

Welcome back to a series of introductory articles on AI Hub, the new product feature currently in an early access program! (links: EAP Site for download, documentation ) In the last article, we covered how to create agents and agent tools directly in ObjectScript using the new %AI classes. However, sometimes, instead of creating a new agent, you just want to add some custom tools to an existing agent so you can ask your local claude code, codex, copilot or other agent of choice to query your data directly. This is where MCP Servers might come in. In this guide, we will walk through how you can create your own MCP Servers to access your data. Disclaimer: AI Hub is an early access preview, with features likely to change before production releases, any issues identified can be raised as issues on the documentation GitHub repo linked above. The EAP preview is not to be used in production settings. A very brief intro to MCP I'm going to keep this brief because there are loads of other good articles on MCP Servers Model context protocol (I recommend starting with this article from @pietro .DiLeo or this brilliant introductory video from InterSystems President Don Woodlock). Model Context Protocol is a transport protocol allowing external tools to be added to an agent . There is a discovery 'handshake' where the MCP server sends a list of tools to the MCP Client. After the tools are discovered, the agent can send requests for tool executions, including parameters, to the MCP server, which executes the tool call and returns the result. MCP servers can be remote servers, i.e. running on a different machine to a client, this usually uses a streamable http/https connection or Server-Side Events. Or MCP servers can be local servers, i.e. running on the same machine, usually using a stdio connection. An important distinction AI hub allows you to create custom MCP servers within your IRIS environment, allowing agents to access or monitor your IRIS databases, productions and statu