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Start free trial →Super Data Science: ML & AI Podcast with Jon Krohn · AI Builders · November 2026
Asked when engineers should reach for an agent, an MCP server, a plugin or a skill, the Salesforce executive lays out a stack with models as compute, harnesses as the OS and skills as apps. The episode was sponsored by Salesforce and Claude.
Correct. You, your agents, you, your agents' agents, whoever, whoever is looking.
…and that kind of thing. But when should my listeners, who are hands-on AI engineers, data scientists, they're building solutions with agentic AI, when should they be going straight for a pre-built agent, going for an MCP server, going for a plug into an AI tool, or just going for skills? It's
a good question. I mean, I think the thing that I'm seeing sort of start to play out is I think the way software sort of works for certain personas is changing pretty drastically. I think you kind of have a pattern emerging where, you know, the large language models kind of represent what would traditionally be considered compute. They're the reasoning and computational layer. And then you have these agentic AI harnesses, you know, like a Cloud Code or Cloud Co-Work, ChatGPT work, you know, news, dots, all of these things that sort of sit at this layer that would have traditionally been occupied, I think, by the operating system. This is sort of the iOS or Windows sort of layer where you're orchestrating the compute across different tasks. And then you have sort of the plugins, skills, MCP servers, which I think occupy the area in the stack that really would have been the app layer, right? So it's like these are the different applications and extensions that you can plug into the operating system that do, you know, domain-specific work, are opinionated about how certain things are done. And so as I think about that architecture, I think really deeply about how we help, you know, people that are trying to build something in that world explore the things that they need across the different layers of that…
Really nicely said. I particularly like the analogy you made of LLMs being like the compute layer and then agents or harnesses, sorry, being like the OS layer that we have in traditional software. And then everything else that you were talking about, skills, plugins, MCP servers being like…
It's an interesting question. I think we're like everyone sort of grappling with this task. And I think. You know, we have some scars from sort of early iterations of what those skills look like and were they working well or not. How predictably can you, you know, can you get the right output from…
For sure. Things are moving fast and things are moving faster than then, for sure. And so there's lots of opportunity, more opportunity than ever, I would argue, for people who are like the listeners to my podcast who are hands-on AI practitioners. And so, actually, on that note, for our listeners…