How Deerfield Group turned scattered AI tools into one governed gateway
Deerfield Group moved early on Model Context Protocol (MCP) and ended up with duplicate tools spread across teams. They consolidated everything behind MintMCP, giving teams one vetted marketplace, bundled connectors, and observability for IT. We talked with Juan Vasquez, CTO, about rolling it out to the whole agency in under a month.
Moving early on MCP left tools scattered and ungoverned
Deerfield Group is an advertising agency. Its research, media, and engineering teams each serve clients in their own way, and most of the people doing the work aren't engineers. The company moved on AI early, building MCP tools before most companies had heard of MCP. But every team built its own, and no one could see across all the tools.
Everyone had access to tokens, so when someone needed a tool that didn't exist yet, they spun up their own. The same connector would end up rebuilt in two or three places. Without a shared marketplace or records of who used what, someone in research or media had no clear way to find the tools IT had already vetted.
“Everybody had access to tokens, so everyone would spin up their own thing, and before we knew it, we had too many of the same things.”
Juan Vasquez
CTO, Deerfield Group
Deerfield needed one place for every vetted tool, and IT needed the governance to manage it.
What Deerfield Group deployed
Deerfield made MintMCP its primary gateway. Now, when someone opens Claude Cowork, Perplexity, or Sky OS, they log into Mint and land in a marketplace of tools IT has already approved. The connectors come bundled, so a person in media doesn't have to figure out a URL or a config file. They add the bundle and start working.
“Instead of putting the load on users to figure out which tool to use, what URL, what config file, we package the tools together so they can just discover them.”
The most-used tool turned out to be the bundle itself, which puts Gmail, calendar, and everyday apps in one connector. One person used it to manage their entire inbox. On the IT side, an MCP streams usage data to an AI impact dashboard. It provides leaders with a clear view of team activity, allowing our IT director, Russ, to monitor everything in real time.
Integration work that used to slow Deerfield down started moving in-house. NetSuite reporting projects that once meant bringing in consultants were rebuilt with an agent that stitched systems together through the gateway.
“They're getting real-time data that wasn't possible in the past.”
The rollout moved faster than anything Juan had run before. The technical setup took a few weeks. Finding the internal champions took longer than the wiring. Within a month, Deerfield had it in place, and usage kept drawing more teams into the rollout.
Deerfield is now at 80 users and more than 30 MCPs, with plans to take it across the whole org, past 200 people. Every new vendor they evaluate gets judged on whether it speaks MCP.
What Deerfield Group told us
- RolloutHow did you come across MintMCP?
- “We knew we wanted an MCP gateway, and a partner connected us with Runlayer, so we evaluated them first. We hit some gaps as we got into it, so I asked an agent to find other options. It came back with about ten companies, and after going through their sites, yours stood out. An agent helping us find a way to wrangle our agents: I thought that was pretty funny.” See how MintMCP compares to Runlayer
- SecurityWhat were you looking for in a gateway?
- “We needed governance. We wanted audit logs, to know what folks were doing, the input and the output. But we also wanted the end-user experience to be elegant, so nontechnical folks could set up their own MCPs. We're an agency, not a technology company, so a lot of our users aren't engineers.”
- RolloutWhat made MintMCP stand out from the other tools?
- “With the other tools, it was just too many clicks to get to a certain action. The payoff was too many hops. When I saw your demo, I'd just spent time doing that exact same task somewhere else with a lot more clicks, and yours was very straightforward. The bundle idea sealed it: instead of making users figure out which tool to use, what URL, what config file, you package the tools together so they can just discover them.”
- RolloutWhat did the rollout look like?
- “We were up and running within a few weeks. Finding the internal champions took longer than the technical side did. I told Russ and Dom it was probably one of the fastest rollouts I've ever been a part of. IT was happy, and the people were happy just to get access to more tools.”
- ImpactWhat changed once the bundle was in place?
- “Before Mint, tool discoverability was really hard. There was no centralized marketplace; everybody had access to tokens, so everyone would spin up their own thing and we'd end up with too many of the same things. Now, it's as simple as adding the bundle to your Claude or Perplexity, and it has all the tools our IT team has already vetted. The bundle is our number one tool by far.”
- SecurityHow do you keep visibility across all of it?
- “We have an MCP connected to pull the activity data, so we built an AI impact dashboard. Our executives can see how a team is performing, who's using more and who's using less. And it gives Russ, our IT director, a lot of peace of mind. He can log in and see what folks are doing at any time. The success and failure rates per tool have been huge for triaging when something's off.”
- ImpactWhat's an example of someone doing real work with it?
- “Someone used Replit with the Mint gateway and our internal MCP servers and, basically, replaced a whole team of contractors. They're pulling real-time data that wasn't possible before, and our CEO was asking how we did it. We also had one guy do 10,000 Gmail calls in a few days. We panicked, but we have the observability, so we reached out. He said he was just organizing every email he'd ever received.”
- ImpactHow is this changing how Deerfield operates?
- “Software is collapsing into a headless interface. Instead of training everybody on every tool's buttons, you wrap everything around one harness and train people on one tool. We're trying to collapse almost every part of our tech stack around that. It's gotten to the point where MCP support is part of how we evaluate vendors now. If there's no MCP, we don't want to learn a new interface.”
- RolloutWhat would you tell a peer just getting started?
- “Get IT out of its box and meet the users where they are. Find a group of power users who are passionate about the problem and meet with them regularly. Get a POC running as fast as you can and iterate. And bring a partner that takes security seriously, because everyone will try things differently and data governance matters. We also leaned on our L&D team to build AI literacy, since a lot of our people are nontechnical.”
Move from duplicate tools across teams to one vetted marketplace
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