AI inside investment firms has changed. A year ago, the conversation was about chat interfaces on top of financial data. Today, the firms moving fastest are running long-running agents, Claude Code, Codex, and similar systems that plan and execute work across hours without constant human input.
That shift has exposed a real problem. These agents pull from whatever data they can reach, often scattered across disconnected sources with no consistent permissions layer. Their outputs land in chat threads, documents, or someone's local folder, with no lineage, no access controls, and no clear path into production. The work gets done, but nobody can verify it, govern it, or build on top of it.
What MCP is
MCP, short for Model Context Protocol, is an open standard that lets AI agents connect to external data sources and take actions through them. Think of it as a universal adapter: instead of every agent needing a custom integration for every data source, MCP makes the connection standardized and plug-and-play.
Most companies have responded to this by shipping a read-only MCP integration. An agent connects, reads data, and answers a question. Done.
A read-only connection lets an agent answer questions. It doesn't let the agent do the job.
What Workspace MCP actually does
Workspace MCP turns OpenBB Workspace into an environment where MCP-compatible agents can do real financial work, not just retrieve data.
A connected agent can reach any data source you have set up in your workspace, whether that's a proprietary database, a licensed vendor feed, an internal system, or public market data. It can query that data, transform it, and combine sources that normally live far apart.
The output is reusable. Instead of a block of text that gets copied into a document and forgotten, an agent running through Workspace MCP produces working widgets, dashboards, and full apps that the rest of the team can open and use straight away. A portfolio manager's morning brief. A credit dashboard built overnight. A full application the whole desk keeps running.
Governed by design
When an analyst points a long-running agent at the workspace, everything that agent does runs through OpenBB Workspace's existing governance layer. There is no side door.
Entitlements apply to the agent exactly as they apply to the user behind it. A junior analyst's agent reads only what that analyst is permissioned for. It never sees the PM's positions.
The artifacts an agent builds are governed too. When an agent creates a widget, a dashboard, or a full app, that artifact inherits access controls like anything else in the workspace. An agent building something doesn't mean the whole firm can see it.
Connections are vaulted. API keys and credentials are managed centrally. An agent can use a data connection without the key ever being exposed or pasted into a prompt.
Every output carries data lineage. You can trace which sources fed into anything an agent produced. That matters when you need to confirm a licensed feed was used within its terms, or when compliance asks where a number came from.
Right now, a lot of firms are solving this the hard way. Analysts are shipping agent-built apps faster than anyone can review them, sending outputs to developers, asking colleagues how to get things into production. Some CTOs are hiring people whose main job is reviewing what the analysts' AI produced.
Workspace MCP removes that review step. The work is governed as it is created.
What you can do with Workspace MCP today
See it in action
Full breakdown
Automate specific analysis workflows (eg. portfolio risk assessment)
Point an agent at your portfolio data and ask it to assess risk. In the second demo above, a single prompt to Codex, "assess the risk of my us_stocks portfolio according to the model calibration output and the factor covariance matrix," triggered the agent to read the Risk Calibration, Portfolio Risk, and Factor Covariance widgets in parallel. It came back with a full structured analysis: 19.09% total volatility, a 76.16% factor risk share, and specific covariance relationships flagging Energy, Liquidity, and Consumer Cyclical as the dominant risk sources. The analyst didn't write a line of code.
Build apps from your connected data
If your data is already connected to the Workspace, an agent can build a working application on top of it. An analyst describes what they need, the agent writes it, and the result is a functioning widget, a dashboard, or even a full app with multiple tabs, not a prototype that needs a developer to productionize. The firm's entitlements apply from the moment the artifact is created.
In the first demo above, Codex was given a PRD and access to Kalshi's public prediction market data. It built the full Kalshi Event Explorer from scratch: 10 widgets across 4 tabs covering event discovery, market inspection, orderbook data, and probability analysis, including the apps.json and widgets.json configuration files.
Ask an agent to explain what you're looking at
When an analyst opens a dashboard they didn't build, they can ask an agent to walk them through it. In the demo, Codex read the full Open Portfolio analytics app and explained each tab, its inputs, its configuration, and what the numbers meant, in plain language. That kind of institutional knowledge transfer normally takes a meeting. Here it takes 25 seconds.
Turn analysis into a shareable widget
After running an analysis, an agent can write the output directly into a new HTML widget inside your workspace. Both CoCo and Codex in the demos above created a new tab with a structured widget containing the full findings, ready to be shared with a portfolio manager or pinned to a dashboard. No copy-paste, no reformatting. The artifact lives in the Workspace, governed by the same access controls as everything else.
Long-running agents are going to run inside your firm whether you plan for it or not. Most of the output will end up in a chat thread, ungoverned, untraceable, and useful to nobody. Workspace MCP is how that changes.
Get started
Workspace MCP is open source. The server code lives at github.com/OpenBB-finance/workspace-mcp and is available to all Workspace users, including the community edition.
You run a local MCP server yourself, which means you stay in control of what runs in your environment and what the agent can reach. Setup takes under five minutes.
Here's how to get connected:
- Install the Workspace MCP sidecar on your machine following the setup instructions in the documentation - OpenBB MCP Quickstart
- Run the local server
- Open OpenBB Workspace, click the hamburger menu in the top left, and enable MCP Companion mode
- Connect your agent of choice, Claude Code, Codex, or any MCP-compatible client
Once connected, the agent can read your active session, manage widgets, build apps from your connected data, and navigate dashboards on your behalf.
For teams that want to run the full setup inside their own premises or VPC, reach out to our team, and we can walk through what that looks like.