Chris Hudson may have dabbled his way into automotive history.
Hudson, general manager of Mark Miller Subaru in Salt Lake City, was tinkering with AI tools when he realized he could build an agent to shop his own store.
So he did.
Driving the news: Hudson used an AI agent from CarEdge to negotiate with his own sales team, but didn’t tell them.
His staff spent four hours working a deal with a machine.
"Neither one of the salespeople knew that they were talking to a machine," Hudson told Daily Dealer Live host Sam D’Arc. "There's no emotion, there's no heart; it's all parameters with the agent."
It also helped illuminate what's already living inside dealer CRMs: Car Edge, for instance, has facilitated over 100,000 agent-to-human negotiations.
After the agent-to-human interaction came the agent-to-agent deal.
"We shopped against ourselves, and then when we did that, it was kind of surprising to us,” Hudson said. “So I thought, ‘Well, we probably should build our own agent.’”
Between the lines: Hudson built a DMC-12 protocol, which is an open-source framework that he said acts kinda like a catcher's mitt for AI-driven leads.
If that number/letter combo seems familiar, that’s because it is, at least for fans of the classic Back to the Future movie series.
"DMC-12 is the DeLorean,” Hudson told CDG News. “That's the model number of the car that they are in when they go Back to the Future."
It routes agent inquiries into a separate agent relationship management tool, instead of polluting CRM stats with non-human contacts. (He published it free at dmc-12.ai.)
The protocol works with the Universal Commerce Protocol, the same framework Walmart, Home Depot, Visa, and American Express are building toward.
In other words, it’s a shared language that would allow AI agents to transact across any retailer, including dealerships, without friction.
Why it matters: Hudson estimates agent-to-agent transactions currently represent about a half percent of automotive volume.
He added that that’s about where internet deals were in the late 1990s. (Apologies to anyone who heard that sentence, too).
"As soon as people realize it's there, it'll increase quickly," Hudson said, adding that most buyers would rather skip the negotiation entirely and just get to the end result.
He compared it to ordering a takeout and asked: Would you rather yell through the phone for someone to write down an order, go pick it up, and then drive home, or push a button and the food just shows up.
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Now, to be clear: His vision doesn’t include human-less dealerships.
Instead, he envisions a human retail path and an agentic retail path, acknowledging that many will still take the human route.
“All I'm suggesting is that as time passes, more people will move over in that agentic retail lane,” he said.
Worth noting: Hudson’s AI agents have completed a few more deals since that initial sale.
He pointed out that after a sale, a human may get involved for finance questions or similar.
To his knowledge, this is the first agent-to-agent sale.
Hudson said he did extensive research before claiming the first agent-to-agent deal, including consulting with Zach at CarEdge, the only third-party company that offers an agent on the buyer side.
"He had never heard of this before when I reached out to him," Hudson said. "I can't find any other… I've been talking about it in my newsletter for six months now, and no one's came and told me, ‘Actually, you're wrong.’"
Looking ahead: Hudson is actively building what he calls a frictionless middle. Meaning connecting the DMC-12 protocol through a CRM handoff and into digital retailing tools.
We can’t help but wonder if one day he’ll find a way to help us hitch a ride back to October 1985, too.
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