The handshake: how tools talk to each other
An agent can learn each tool on its own. The hard part is tools passing a customer between them safely.
Most people picture an AI agent talking to one tool at a time: ask the inventory tool, then ask the service tool. An agent can learn each of those on its own. The part nobody has solved is the tools talking to each other.
The problem
Say a customer tells their agent: "Find me an SUV under $40,000, work out a payment with my trade, and book a test drive."
- The dealer's website gateway takes the request.
- It asks the trade tool to value the customer's car.
- It asks the payment tool to price a lease.
- It asks the CRM to create the lead and the scheduler to book the drive.
Every one of those tools needs to know the customer said yes to this. Today the only way is to pass their name, email and phone number down the chain, so every tool ends up holding personal data it didn't need, and nobody can prove what the customer actually agreed to.
The handshake
The handshake is the small set of things tools agree on so they can pass a customer along without passing their personal data around:
- "This customer authorized me." Each tool gets a signed pass that says who authorized what, for how long, and nothing more. It can check the signature without seeing an email address.
- "This customer agreed to be contacted." A signed consent receipt travels with the customer, and any tool can verify it. If they withdraw it, every tool can find out.
- "This is the same store." A shared way to say which rooftop a request belongs to, so a dealer group's tools stay in their lane.
This is the only part of AutomotiveMCP that has to be agreed on, because it only works if everyone does it the same way. Everything else is up to each vendor.
Where it stands
Portable consent is drafted and running as a live demo. Agent sign-in on a customer's behalf and multi-rooftop groups are drafted in the docs and open for comment. The base MCP protocol doesn't solve agent-to-agent sign-in yet, so this is work we expect to take back to the wider MCP community.