Dealers are asking vendors a question nobody can answer yet

Walk a dealership's tech stack today and you'll find the same question being put to every vendor: "Do you support MCP — and which version?"

It's a good question. AI agents are starting to do real work in retail automotive — qualifying leads, booking service, pricing trades — and the Model Context Protocol is how they'll plug into the systems that run the store. The problem is that right now there's no canonical answer. Each vendor can say "yes, we support MCP" and mean something completely different, because there's no shared definition of what a dealership MCP server should expose.

We think there should be — and over the next week we'll be proposing one, in the open.

The math that makes this necessary

A dealership runs on a DMS, one or more CRMs, a website platform, service scheduling, parts, and F&I tooling. An agent that's actually useful has to reach into several of them. Built the way it's built today — by hand, one pairing at a time — that's an N×M problem: every agent wired to every system, each integration weeks of work and tens of thousands of dollars, each one fragile and rebuilt from scratch across the industry.

A shared standard turns N×M into N+M. Implement it once; interoperate with everything. That's the whole idea, and it only works if the standard is neutral — which is why what we're building is a council with a public draft, not a product.

What we're putting forward

• A draft specification — RFC v0.1. Scope and non-goals (this is the retail layer, distinct from vehicle-signal standards like COVESA/VSS), conformance and versioning, eight canonical domains — including a first-class Consent & Compliance domain — naming conventions, and a security profile. It's a draft we expect to change.
• A founding cohort. The organizations that shape v1 with us. No fee at this stage.
• Governance in the open. Who runs the council, how it stays neutral, and how a change becomes part of the standard.

Why now

Standards are easiest to set before the bespoke approaches calcify. The protocol exists, the demand is here, and the canonical answer hasn't been written yet. We'll formally launch the council in the coming days — but the argument is simple enough to make now: if you build or operate dealership systems, this is the moment that answer gets written, and you can help write it.