Sooner or later someone on the sales or operations team asks: "Can I just ask the AI where my order is?" They have seen what assistants like Claude or ChatGPT can do with documents, and now they want the same thing with the data that actually runs the business.

The tempting answer is to give the model a database connection and a clever prompt. Please don't. The better answer in a Laravel app is a small MCP server that exposes a few narrow, read-only tools, runs every call through your existing authorization, and returns only the fields the assistant needs.

This post walks through that setup with the official laravel/mcp package, using a generic "order status" example from a typical ERP.

The problem: AI wants data, your ERP wants rules

An ERP or CRM is mostly rules: who can see which customer, which warehouse, which price list, which margin.…