2025 ODSC West Workshop: Rethinking RAG: How MCP and Agent2Agent Will Transform the Future of Intelligent Search

Welcome to the landing page for the workshop Rethinking RAG: How MCP and Agent2Agent Will Transform the Future of Intelligent Search at the 2025 Open Data Science Conference (ODSC) West.

What to Expect

This workshop intends to provide an introduction to:

• Introduction to using Agent2Agent (A2A) Protocol to connect multiple agents together
• Introduction to using Model Context Protocol (MCP) to use with an AI Agent
• How to Build an Alternative to a RAG Agent That Provides Similar Functionality
• How To Connect This Agent With a Traditional RAG Agent (Using OpenSearch)

All of this using Small Language Models (SLM) which require less resources at inference time.

Software Prerequisites

• A Linux or Mac-based Developer’s Laptop with enough memory to run a database (ie OpenSearch) plus Intel's neural-chat SLM (below).
  • Windows Users should use a VM or Cloud Instance
• Python Installed: version 3.12 or higher
• (Recommended) Using a miniconda or venv virtual environment
• Docker (Linux or MacOS) Installed: for running a local OpenSearch instance
• Basic familiarity with shell operations

Docker images you should pre-pull in your environment:

• docker image pull opensearchproject/opensearch:3

LLM to pre-download:

This is the official one used in today's workshop:

• Intel's neural-chat-7B-v3-3-GGUF

OR

• Huggingface bartowski/Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct-GGUF

OR

• Alternatively, using ollama
  • Llama 3B: https://ollama.com/library/llama3:8b

Participation Options

There are 4 separate demos:

• demo/1_contradictory
• demo/2_mcp_whats_relevant
• demo/3_a2a_simple
• demo/4_a2a_financials

The instructions and purpose for each demo is contained within their respective folders.