There's a war happening inside every major technology company about how AI agents should connect to the tools they use. This week Stripe dropped 288 product announcements including MCP support for their financial infrastructure. OpenAI shipped four CLI versions in eight days. Google launched an Agents CLI. Shopify open-sourced MCP plugins. The Linux Foundation took over the protocol.

And a developer benchmark went viral claiming MCP is 10-32x more expensive than CLI and already obsolete. Your CTO has an opinion. Your channel rep has a pitch. All of it is based on a debate written by developers for developers. This episode translates it for everyone else.

WHAT WE COVER:

What MCP actually is, the USB-C for AI. What CLI actually is, and why it's not just a developer tool. The simplest framework: CLI for legacy systems, MCP for SaaS. Why the benchmark is real but the conclusion is wrong. The three layers every AI deployment needs: execution, connectivity, governance. What MIP and MIP-RA are and how the Optimization API makes the transport irrelevant. The governed vs. ungoverned distinction that actually matters. Real scenarios: manufacturing, home health, SaaS portco. What MSPs should be building and billing for right now. Three questions every PE operator should ask their CTO this week.

KEY STATS:

97M monthly MCP SDK downloads, up from 100K at launch 18 months ago. CLI is 10-32x cheaper on tokens than MCP for identical tasks. 88% of MCP servers have insecure credential handling. Gartner: 40% of enterprise apps will include AI agents by end of 2026.

SERIES:

Episode 107, What Is the AI Harness? Episode 108, Headless AI. Episode 109, The Great MCP vs. CLI Debate.

FOR: PE operating partners. Portco CEOs. MSPs building an AI managed service. TSDs and channel partners whose agents are getting asked about AI every week.

Mid-Market AI is hosted by Ariel Jalali, CEO of Paragon Technology Solutions. Paragon is a Managed Intelligence Provider, a CAIO and CDO-led team deployed inside PE-backed and mid-market companies, delivering AI as a managed service through the TSD and MSP channel. paragoncto.com

Paragon - Managed Intelligence Provider (MIP™)

Parker Harris, co-founder of Salesforce, stood on stage at TDX this week and asked publicly: "Why should you ever log into Salesforce again?" That question is what this episode is about.

Headless AI means your software is about to start working whether a human touches it or not. But this is not about building autonomous agent fleets or ripping out your stack. It is about AI-driven actions delivered to the systems already doing the acting - one workflow at a time, with a dial that lets you decide how much human judgment stays in each loop.

This episode covers the three untenable extremes facing mid-market companies today, what headless looks like across six real-world patterns, the tariff demand planning crisis hitting distributors right now, how home health operators are recovering 3-4% of net patient revenue lost to claim denials, what Salesforce Headless 360 and the OpenAI Agents SDK mean for your stack, and why this wave is different from the failed headless ecommerce wave of 2019-2022.

For five audiences: the portco CEO navigating margin pressure, the PE operating partner building AI into the value creation plan, the MSP channel partner watching seat revenue compress, the vertical software product manager whose roadmap changes when the UI becomes optional, and the operator already building this without knowing what to call it.

Mid-Market AI is produced by Paragon Technology Solutions.

Paragon - Managed Intelligence Provider (MIP™)

What is an AI Harness?

$200 billion invested in AI. 6% meaningful impact. The gap has a name -and it's not the model.

In this episode, Ariel Jalali breaks down the most practical concept in AI right now: the harness. The infrastructure layer that sits between your business and the raw model - and the reason most AI projects work in a demo and die in production.

You'll learn the formula every operator needs to know (Agent = Model + Harness), why nearly half of enterprises are completely blind to what their AI agents are doing inside their own systems, and the difference between single player and multiplayer AI- and why jumping between them without a harness is the fastest way to become a cautionary tale.

Ariel also covers why you probably picked the wrong size model (not the wrong vendor), what that's costing you at scale, and the land grab happening inside Claude Code and Codex that most mid-market companies haven't noticed yet. Plus real examples from a specialty food manufacturer and a home health operator already running harness-grade AI -without ever calling it that.

If your AI experiments haven't turned into results, this episode is the answer.

Mentions: Mitchell Hashimoto on engineering the harness, Andrej Karpathy on agents as the new customer, Gartner's 40%+ agentic project cancellation risk, and BCG's 2026 research on companies stuck in deploy mode.

Mid-Market AI is produced by Paragon Technology Solutions. Paragon puts Chief AI Officer-led data & AI engineering capabilities inside PE-backed and mid-market companies.

Paragon - Managed Intelligence Provider (MIP™)

Description:
Uber's CTO just blew through the company's entire 2026 AI budget - and it's only April. Claude was named as the main driver. So if Uber can't afford it, should you even be trying?

In this episode, Ariel Jalali, CEO of Paragon, breaks down why going all-in on a single AI vendor is a one-door decision you may not be able to walk back. He covers the three types of AI (productivity, vertical, and efficiency), five frameworks for making smarter vendor decisions, and a four-layer reference architecture that protects your data, your optionality, and your budget — no matter where token pricing goes.

In this episode:

• Why the Uber story is a warning sign for every PE-backed company
• Productivity AI vs. Efficiency AI - and why conflating them risks deployments
• The "lethal trifecta" security risk most companies are ignoring
• Why using multiple AI vendors is good engineering, not compromise
• The spreadsheet trap: before you automate, ask if the process should exist at all
• What a real reference architecture (RA)  / AI harness platform looks like in practice

If you're an operator, investor, or operating partner making AI vendor decisions - send this one to someone who needs to hear it.

Paragon - Managed Intelligence Provider (MIP™)

Host Ariel Jalali, CEO and CAIO of Paragon, sits down with Ron Kim, former Global CTO at Merck and founder of Ron Kim Advisory, to tackle the question every C-suite leader is asking: is your organization actually ready for AI, and is AI actually ready for you?

Ron brings 35 years of hard-won perspective from global enterprise technology. He recently completed a five-year tenure as Global CTO at Merck, one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, and has previously served as CIO at Exelon Utilities and McAfee. He spent five years advising TPG's $120B private equity portfolio on technology strategy and due diligence, began his career at Accenture rising to Partner and Managing Director, and now offers independent executive AI and fractional CIO/CTO advisory services.

Ariel and Ron cut through the noise on the questions every enterprise leader is wrestling with right now. What does AI and agentic AI actually mean in practice? How do you tell real transformation from shelfware? How should a CIO get control of shadow AI and tool sprawl? And why isn't the first question always whether a process should even exist before you automate it?

The conversation goes deeper into the trust gap between AI startups and the enterprise, the process debt elephant that derails most AI initiatives, and real-world use cases and cautionary tales from healthcare, life sciences and pharma. Ron also shares his unfiltered take on whether the major AI model vendors are truly ready for the enterprise.

The episode closes with a direct challenge to leadership teams: AI transformation is not a CIO problem. It is a culture and change management problem, and the bottleneck, as always, is people.

For C-suite executives, PE operators evaluating portco AI readiness, and technology leaders driving AI transformation and automation, this episode delivers the practical, unfiltered intelligence you need.

Learn more about Paragon: paragoncto.com Learn more about Ron Kim Advisory: ronkimadvisory.com

Paragon - Managed Intelligence Provider (MIP™)