An MCP server is a program that exposes a tool’s capabilities, running a query, reading lineage, validating a pipeline, to any AI agent that speaks the Model Context Protocol, so Claude Code, Cursor, or ChatGPT can operate the tool directly. This explainer covers what an MCP server does for data work, what a good one exposes, and how Bruin’s compares with the MCP servers from dbt, Snowflake, Databricks, and BigQuery.