Attio goes agent-native: SQL access, event data and 1.6 billion API calls a month

Key points

Key takeaways from a Scaling Europe interview with Attio Founder & CEO Nicolas Sharp (October 2026):

Agent scale. Attio now powers 1.6 billion API calls a month as AI agents take over CRM work; Model Context Protocol usage is growing about 50% month over month and Sharp projected roughly 37 million MCP calls for the current month.

Agent-ready architecture. The company launched a rebuilt, fundamentally agent-ready architecture that exposes Attio as infrastructure — agents can now query and write to it directly over SQL as if it were a database, combining infrastructure-level scale with business-application guardrails.

Data at a new order of magnitude. Customers already store tens of millions of records per object type, and Attio is raising storage limits by another order of magnitude while adding ingestion of third-party event data such as website visits, bundled through a new "interfaces" concept for cross-source reporting.

Paying for agent compute. Sharp confirmed he had signed an eight-figure compute deal, and argued rising inference costs are offset by phenomenally growing revenue and customer base as agents multiply software's utility rather than ending it.

Sales teams transformed. Agents now handle lead routing, research and call prep so revenue teams spend their time with customers; Sharp cited Attio customers seeing around 2.5 times more deals in their first year without adding headcount.

Built-in, not bolted on. Attio is embedded inside Claude, Notion and ChatGPT, yet Attio's own benchmarks show its harness returning similar results at roughly 6x lower time and cost than a generic orchestrating model, through tuned subagents and vector-store interaction.

Universal context. The vector store ties every call, email and support ticket onto entity records, making a full 360-degree view of the customer queryable by agents — the system of record Sharp argues is the durable value as pure tools get commoditised.

London's category leader. Sharp argued software tools alone are hard to defend while platforms orchestrating data governance and customer policy win, and that London's talent pool and "lack of options" drive make it a serious home for European category leaders like Attio.

Read more: Scaling Europe