AWS: Smartsheet Saved 3 Billion Tokens by Building a Remote MCP Server with Bedrock and a Neptune Knowledge Graph

What is MCP, and why is Smartsheet building it on AWS?

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is a standard that gives AI agents structured access to external tools and data — instead of every AI assistant having its own, incompatible connector for every application. Smartsheet built a remote MCP server based precisely on that standard to give AI agents secure, governance-controlled access to data from worksheets, projects, and portfolios. The architecture is fully hosted on AWS: Amazon Bedrock carries the AI layer, while AWS WAF and Shield protect the server from abuse at the network edge.

What does the technical architecture behind it look like?

The server runs on AWS Fargate, a serverless container platform that eliminates the need for manual server management. Amazon Kinesis combined with Apache Flink processes data streams in real time, while Amazon S3 serves as scalable storage. The most interesting part is the Amazon Neptune graph database, which powers the knowledge graph — a structure that connects entities (rows, sheets, users, relationships) so an AI agent can trace connections between data instead of just reading isolated tables.

How many tokens does the proprietary serialization format save?

Smartsheet developed a proprietary serialization format for MCP server responses that reduces the number of tokens by 35 to 47% on data-heavy responses, compared to the standard JSON serialization format commonly used to exchange structured data with LLMs. That difference translates directly into lower cost and faster processing for every AI query that retrieves large amounts of rows or columns.

What has the real impact been since launch?

Since the server launched, Smartsheet has recorded more than 3 billion tokens saved — a direct consequence of the optimized format applied across a large volume of queries. Adoption has been equally striking: the number of users grew 87% weekly in the first four weeks after release, pointing to rapid organic adoption within Smartsheet’s user base without the need for aggressive marketing.