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What is an MCP gateway?
An MCP gateway is a single, governed entry point between AI agents and the tools they call over the Model Context Protocol (MCP). When an agent asks to update a Salesforce deal, the gateway checks who is asking, confirms that person may make the change, passes the call on, and records what happened.
Gateways come in two shapes. Some route agents to MCP servers you already run and apply rules on the way through. Others publish their own governed tools built on connectors to each system, so there are fewer separate servers to govern. Several products do both.
Why it matters
Without a gateway, every MCP server holds its own credentials, its own permissions and its own log. A team with servers for Salesforce, Jira and Slack has three of each to keep straight, and nobody can say which agent changed which record. Agents also tend to inherit the full access of whoever set them up, which is how a convenience turns into a way into the CRM.
A gateway puts the rules in one place: which tools exist, who can call them, which actions need a person’s approval, and a record of every call with its inputs and result. The MCP security checklist covers the controls a gateway should enforce, and the MCP gateway comparison sets out how eleven products approach it. MCP vs API explains why building on the APIs beats proxying a server per system.
MCP gateways at Tray.ai
Agent Gateway for MCP is Tray.ai’s MCP gateway, built on the second shape. Instead of a separate server for each system, it connects to each system’s API directly through Tray’s connectors and publishes every tool through one governed MCP layer. Each call is tied to a named person, can run on that person’s own credentials, is scoped to its job and is logged in one place, whichever client makes it: Claude, OpenAI, Copilot Studio or your own framework.
J.W. Pepper shows what that looks like in production: 500+ MCP tools reduced to about 20 governed workflows, with zero raw database access, launched in weeks. Composite tools do a multi-step job in one call. A Customer 360 tool pulls a customer’s Salesforce, Zendesk and Stripe records together, which cuts token use by up to 10× and runs the same steps every time. Agent Gateway doesn’t proxy MCP servers, because it doesn’t need to. A team that needs a particular vendor’s server to stay in the path would put a different gateway in front of that server.