Cutting Idle Time: How MCP Enables Interactive Agents That Sleep

Agents spend most of their time waiting, not working. This talk examines how interactive agents that suspend and resume can eliminate idle compute costs, and how the Model Context Protocol (MCP) supports that pattern.

■ Why Agents Idle
- Where waiting happens in a typical agent loop, and the cost of keeping processes running for weeks or months
- Three defining traits of interactive agents

■ MCP Features for Sleepable Agents
- Idle suspension: replacing long-lived client-server streams with multi-round-trip requests
- Work continuing during suspension: the tasks extension and task IDs for long-running calls
- External wake-ups: server-to-client events via polling, data streams, and webhooks

■ Practical Experience
- Amazon's Infinity experiment, which runs agents as short execution slices
- Scaling examples and three calls to action for adopters

Developers building MCP clients and servers, agent framework authors, and teams running always-on agent workloads will come away with a concrete view of the suspension pattern and the spec updates that enable it.