Connect your own AI assistant to your dealership

Why this matters now

Any modern AI assistant can already click around a web app. What it cannot do is own a phone number, hold your 10DLC registration with the carriers, record a call lawfully in a two-party-consent state, prove three years later that a customer agreed to be contacted, or stop itself when the wallet runs dry.

That is the layer an AI has to act through, and it is the part that takes months and a compliance review to build. Connecting your assistant to Lead Friendly gives it hands without giving it the ability to break rules on your behalf.

What your assistant can do once connected

Three groups of tools and three kinds of key, so you allow exactly as much as you mean to. A read-only key can only look; the assistant never even sees the other tools. A read + setup key can also do the setup work — everything it builds is created switched off — but never sees the tools that reach customers. A read + write key gets all three groups: it can also text, call and book, each through the same checks your staff go through.

Building your agent on day one

This is what makes a brand-new account useful the hour you connect it. Hand the assistant your website and a starting template and it crawls the site, drafts a voice agent, writes the script and knowledge from what it read, routes one of your numbers to it, sets your hours, and stages your first campaign and follow-up automation — all in one conversation, all created OFF.

The agent lands in review: it will not answer a single call until you have read the script and turned it on yourself. Campaigns arrive as drafts and workflows paused, so nothing dials or fires until you activate it. The assistant sets the table; a person decides to serve.

Setting it up

Ten minutes, once, and nothing is needed from us — no integration project, no IT ticket, no waiting on a vendor.

• In Lead Friendly: Settings → API keys. Name the key and pick its access: “Read only” for a key that can only look, “Read + setup” to let the assistant build your agent and stage campaigns and automations without contacting anyone, or “Read + write” to also let it text, call, book and buy numbers. If you are unsure, start read-only; a second key takes a minute. The key is shown once, so copy it.
• In Claude: Customize → Connectors → Add. Name it, and use the server address https://www.leadfriendly.com/api/mcp/v1
• Choose “No sign-in”, then add a request header: pick “authorization” from the list, with the value “Bearer ” followed by your key.
• Set the read-only tools to “Always allow” and leave the write tools on “Needs approval”.
• Ask it: “Is my account clear to text customers right now?”

Which assistants work

The key decides which dealership the assistant can see, and it can only ever see that one. There is no key that opens two accounts.

What it will refuse, and why that is the feature

Before any message leaves, the assistant runs the chain a salesperson runs: 10DLC registration, do-not-call, STOP replies, consent records, quiet hours in the customer's own time zone, and your wallet balance.

On top of that there is one rule that exists only for AI agents. Marketing outreach requires an affirmative consent record on the contact, and an AI cannot decide a message is exempt — if it claims a text is transactional, that claim is checked before it is believed. There has to be a current appointment it did not book itself, a deal in progress, or a text from the customer in the last month, and the message has to read like one: an offer is refused however it is labelled. A self-declared exemption an AI can type is not an exemption.

When it is refused it is told why, in a sentence you can act on, and it relays that to you instead of retrying. An AI can never override a compliance warning: that takes a human, signed in, on the record.

Some things are off the assistant's surface at every scope, no toggle for them, because each is a legal act by a person or a decision about your account: turning an agent live, releasing a phone number, accepting the terms or AI addendum, passing identity verification, and changing billing or your plan. Those stay yours. Buying a number is the one purchase it can make, and only on a person's terms: the first request quotes the monthly cost and buys nothing, and the purchase is refused until your identity verification is approved and someone in your account has accepted the phone-number TCPA terms. An acceptance signed by an AI is exactly the record that collapses the day a carrier or the FCC asks who agreed — so the assistant builds right up to the line and hands it back to you to cross.

Seeing what it did

Settings → AI agents shows every action any connected assistant took, and every action it was refused, with the reason. The refusals are usually the more interesting half.

Per-account ceilings cap how many texts and calls all connected assistants can make in a day, counted across every connector — so adding a second AI cannot double how many strangers your store's AI can dial. Revoking a key takes effect on the assistant's next request.