The launch of a new Customer Data Platform marks a significant moment for automotive retail as dealers face rising expectations for personalization, data accuracy, and operational efficiency. CDK announced the debut of its Built in Customer Data Platform at NADA 2026, introducing a unified data foundation designed to transform how dealerships understand and engage their customers.
The Built in Customer Data Platform is designed to solve one of the most persistent challenges in automotive retail. Customer information is often scattered across CRM, DMS, service, parts, and third party systems, leaving dealers with outdated or incomplete views of their buyers. CDK aims to eliminate this fragmentation by unifying customer data into a single trusted profile that is accessible directly within the CDK Dealership Xperience environment.
Powered by what the company describes as the industry largest automotive dataset, the platform enriches customer information in real time across the dealership. Dealers can activate clean and trusted data without adding new systems, logins, or operational complexity, a common barrier associated with traditional standalone customer data platforms.
“Dirty, disconnected data has long been one of the biggest obstacles to delivering meaningful customer engagement and targeting high value opportunities,” said Sanjay Almeida, chief product officer at CDK. “Our Built-In CDP solution transforms fragmented data into a single trusted customer profile, enriched with AI and automation. With this new CDK-powered unified customer profile, dealers can deliver highly personalized customer experiences, improve close rates, maximize their marketing investments, and strengthen customer loyalty.”
Unlike external CDPs that operate outside dealership workflows, the Built in Customer Data Platform is embedded directly within the CDK Dealership Xperience, spanning sales, service, marketing operations, and analytics. This native integration allows insights to surface naturally where teams already work, helping staff act on customer intelligence without switching tools or managing duplicate records.
The platform delivers unified customer profiles that connect vehicles, households, and transactions while applying AI driven summaries to surface the most relevant insights at a glance. Dealerships gain visibility into predictive lifetime value, lease and finance milestones, service behaviors, and customer engagement patterns. By automating data hygiene and record management, the platform also reduces duplication and improves long term data quality.
CDK says the Built in Customer Data Platform enables cleaner targeting, stronger attribution, and improved marketing efficiency by giving dealers a complete and current picture of each customer. As part of its broader data strategy, the company will also introduce an Enterprise Customer Data Platform that combines CDK enriched data with dealer owned and third party sources to support advanced segmentation and automation.
The Built in Customer Data Platform will be formally showcased at NADA Show 2026, where dealers can experience live demonstrations. As automotive retail becomes increasingly data driven, the introduction of a Built in Customer Data Platform signals how integrated and actionable data is becoming central to modern dealership growth.
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