GraphQLConf 2026

As teams adopt the Model Context Protocol (MCP), they often run into a new problem: tool sprawl. Every backend API turns into its own MCP server, each with separate schemas, auth, versioning, and deployment concerns. What starts as a clean integration quickly becomes hard to manage. In this talk, I'll show how GraphQL can act as a unifying layer for MCP using GraphQL capabilities like schema introspection and persisted documents. By exposing multiple backend services through a single GraphQL API and connecting it via one MCP server, LLMs gain access to a rich, strongly typed interface without an explosion of tools. We’ll walk through a practical architecture and share patterns for keeping MCP systems scalable, discoverable, and governable beyond early experiments.