Automotive MCP Standards Council launches a draft open standard for dealership AI

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

June 12, 2026 — The Automotive MCP Standards Council today launched with the publication of RFC v0.1 of the Automotive MCP Specification — a proposed, vendor-neutral standard for how dealership systems expose their data and tools to AI agents over the Model Context Protocol (MCP) — and opened recruitment for its founding cohort.

As agentic AI moves into retail automotive, dealers have begun asking vendors a pointed question: "Do you support MCP — and which version?" Until now there has been no canonical specification to answer against. Each vendor's interpretation differs, which recreates — one layer up — the bespoke, one-off integration problem that MCP was meant to solve. The council's draft specification gives the industry a single, conformant surface to build and certify against.

What's available today

• The specification (RFC v0.1). A public draft covering scope and non-goals, conformance and versioning, core concepts, eight canonical dealership domains — Inventory, Leads & CRM, Deals & Desking, Service, Parts, F&I, Marketing & Analytics, and Consent & Compliance — naming conventions, and an OAuth-based security and PII profile. Read it at /spec.
• Founding-partner recruitment. DMS, CRM, and website platforms, AI-agent vendors, dealer groups, and agencies can apply to the founding cohort that will shape v1. There is no membership fee at this stage.
• Open governance. The council publishes how it is run and how it stays neutral, including explicit safeguards that give no vendor — including the council's operational backer — preferential treatment in the specification or in certification.

In their words

"A standard only works if any conformant server is genuinely interchangeable," said Alex Oleynik, co-founder. "v0.1 is a draft on purpose — we're publishing it openly so the working groups and founding partners can harden it into something a vendor can implement once and rely on."

"Dealers shouldn't have to take 'we support MCP' on faith," said Elijah Surratt, co-founder. "The point of a neutral council — and, soon, certification — is to make that claim something a vendor can prove, at a version the whole industry shares."

What's next

Certification is being defined now and opens after v0.1 stabilizes with founding partners; organizations can register interest today. A reference server and a conformance test suite are planned to accompany ratification, so that "conformant" becomes verifiable rather than self-declared.

About the founders

Alex Oleynik

Co-founder · Specification

Leads the technical direction of the specification and the working-group process. Focused on making conformance objective and the protocol genuinely interchangeable across dealer systems.

Elijah Surratt

Co-founder · Partnerships & certification

Leads partnership and the certification program. Works with DMS, CRM, website and AI-agent vendors to align the standard with the realities of retail automotive.

About the Automotive MCP Standards Council

The Automotive MCP Standards Council is a proposed open standards body defining how dealership systems expose data and tools to AI agents over the Model Context Protocol. It is run by its founders and founding members, governed in the open, and backed operationally by Creative Code.Digital.

Contact: council@automotivemcp.ai