Digital agents from your digital agency

Let's get existential

Just a few weeks ago, both Google and OpenAI announced they would support MCP, a new protocol developed by a competitor in the AI space, and this milestone is being compared to the development of HTTP or APIs: a moment where several independent technologies come together and a new standard is born.

Hype abounds, and who knows what the future holds, but we share the excitement for this new standard. It enables teams like ours to connect tools to AI in ways that lets them act on their own: to search stuff, buy stuff, create stuff, DO stuff - with or without human intervention.

Why are we talking about it? Because we believe everything to do with software and the web is about to change. And we're getting in front of it (you should too).

Start planning for how AI will change and integrate with your business, like today.


First thing’s first

It's impossible to scroll through LinkedIn (eew) without seeing these acronyms. This is what they mean.

1. LLM

Let’s get the one you might know out of the way: LLMs. That’s ‘Large Language Model,’ and they’re what ChatGPT, Co-Pilot and Gemini use to talk to you. LLMs interpret the relationships between words as sets of numbers.

But LLMs are trained on generic data rather than information specific to your business, and one downside is they famously 'hallucinate' answers when they lack information. You could train your own LLM, but that typically requires more power and compute than mid-sized cities. So how can they be useful to companies who need to get real information to customers, now? I bet you assume we have an answer? Nice. We actually do.


As a business, your first move into AI doesn't have to be grueling, overly complex or take years, and you don’t have that kind of time anyway. You have APIs and datasets, let's use them today.

Sienna BastSenior Technical Architect

2. RAG

Your encounters with hallucinating chatbots have probably left you skeptical that AI can be trusted for YOUR business tasks demanding specificity and accuracy, but that's where these new techniques and protocols come in.

One is called RAG - Retrieval Augmented Generation. We use this technique to augment LLMs with your own data by storing it in a database, similar to the kind your company website might use today, and sending it along with a user's question to the LLM. Those databases are called Vector Databases and are efficient at taking the context of a user's question and finding the most correct answers to it - based on your real data.

3. MCP

This is the new one. MCP - Model Context Protocol - standardizes tools available to large language models (LLMs), allowing them to retrieve and utilize specific data, specifications, and integrations. For example, an LLM can use MCP to find product specifics to answer customer inquiries accurately. MCP integrates with APIs, web resources, software applications, and even desktop actions.

Almost anything you can do on a computer, MCP can do without being given explicit directions. This changes the game.

Note: This flow is abstracted and simplified. Tools are technically just MCP methods that access API endpoints, databases, or other 3rd party data sources. The path might loop several times, communicating which tools are available, reasoning which to use and passing them the information they need.

How we fit

This isn’t our first shift, and it won’t be our last. Northern Ground is built for:

  • Integration: We have always specialized in making systems talk to each other. This is that, just more.

  • Speed: With standardized tools and protocols, the guesswork is gone. We can stand up a POC and get talking about AI strategy in a matter of days.

  • Strategy: To help you uncover ways new technologies can solve real problems and impact your business.

  • CX: We put the user first in the systems we design and the new platforms we integrate.

  • Software Development Lifecycle: We test, train and optimize systems for results.

Thought Starters

Activate unstructured data

Suck up all your PDFs, white papers, MSDS's, manuals and spec sheets via RAG into a searchable, indexable, actionable database.

Automate support

Resolve support tickets with accurate answers from YOUR inventory data, initiate simple tasks through system integrations, and escalate to humans when queries exceed scope.

Bulk transfer content between platforms

Take thousands of your old Sharepoint pages and semantically convert them to any new platform, like LumApps. Simple - with huge upside.

There’s a lot more to AI than what we've covered. This new 'agentic' web is a huge topic that's going to change everything we touch or do, and those changes are going to come faster than most people expect.

The less scary news is that we are built for this. We are ready to partner with you to harness these new possibilities into something that feels practical, useful and exciting.

Weirdly, we like change.

Contact us to talk about fit and we’ll find a place to start. Or go ahead and wait things out. Maybe we're wrong and it’s just a fad!