A People-first playbook: Putting AI to work in your dealership

Franchise dealers have always lived at two speeds: now, and now (but faster).

Service demand starts stacking up at 7:30 a.m. and again at 4:45 p.m. Sales demand comes in waves. Meanwhile, your best people spend too many minutes on busy-work that doesn’t even move the customer forward.

This is where AI belongs in your store.

Not as a wall between dealer staff and buyers. Not as a shiny gimmick cobbled together by a company that was in a rush to get something, anything, on the market before anyone else. AI should be adopted carefully and with the explicit understanding that it is a force multiplier. That approach will give time back to the dealers who want to create real value.

The thesis on dealership AI

Dealership AI should empower your people, without positioning to arbitrarily replace them. If your dealership doesn’t need people to make the machine run, then the machine doesn’t really need your individual dealership, does it? Instead of focusing only on the potential cost-savings of replacing people, focus on the value-output; in other words, adopt AI technology that makes your dealership greater than the sum of it’s parts.

Let the software handle the chores that slow you down: data entry, appointment setting, lead cleanup, call summaries, after hours responses, missing doc flags and much more. Free your sales pros, advisors, and BDC to do what only people can do—provide clarity, trust, negotiation, coaching, and importantly: reading the room.

This should be the point. More attention for your customers, and less for your screens and keyboards.

Make the customer experience effortless

If customers feel less friction, from one end of the journey to the other, your team did it’s job to ensure they keep coming back to spend their hard-earned pay.

Used well, AI can anticipate and help meet your team’s needs, keeping the dealership voice consistent across all channels, and making next steps obvious. It doesn’t just add a layer of cold and sterile automation; it removes the extra clicks and callbacks that slow you down.

A practical and forward-thinking view of what AI in your dealership could look like

AI is not magic, and despite the best intentions of some- nobody wants to feel like they are being handed off to a robot when they are trying to purchase a vehicle. So, what does practical and responsible use of AI look like? For the most part, I would argue that it generally just looks like time-savings.

• Inventory and Sales: AI powered forecasting and dynamic pricing models will be able to accelerate your turn-times, help you acquire more 1st party trades, and boost your grosses.
• Service: AI powered schedulers optimize bay load, send repair status updates, and trigger parts ready notifications, reducing no shows and the dreaded “Dude, where’s my car?” calls.
• Intelligent Desking & F&I: Adapt finance structures in real time, auto-fill forms, flag missing stips, and generate compliant summaries so managers spend more time on earning trust (and PVR) in the box, and less on paperwork.
• An Omnichannel Marketing Revolution: AI analyzes and segments audiences, drafts variants, optimizes A/B’s, and ultimately allows your team to scale its communication strategy by delivering powerful and personalized 1:1 multi-touch marketing campaigns.

Store culture determines the outcome

Shiny new tools don’t fix a busted culture. You are not going to run out and buy a new piece to add to your software Franken-stack that will make up for bad processes and a lack of discipline.

The message to your team should be unmissable and repeatable: “We’re using AI to handle the grunt work so you can focus on your customers.” Then execute on that.

Start small. One workflow. Short pilot. Put your best foot forward to make it work.

Measure what matters. Time saved. Speed to lead. Show rates. Close rates. CSI. Dollars per RO. Turn and aged units, etc.

Iterate and refine with the people who live it. Advisors, BDC, desk managers, bring them all into the loop and keep them there.

Scale deliberately. When your analysis (and the team) says “greenlight”, move to the next workflow, and optimize.

That’s how you build trust instead of barriers and resistance.

Ask yourself, does this solution lead to better outcomes?

There are so many distractions and shiny objects popping up in this space over the last couple of years, but we should be asking ourselves: what is the actual output we hope to achieve with this adoption?

Variable ops

• Speed to lead and speed to first appointment.
• Show rate, demo rate, close rate.
• Front and back end gross, turn time, aged unit reduction.

Fixed ops

• Appointment adherence and bay utilization.
• Dollars per RO, one‑and‑done percentage.
• Advisor caseload and average time‑to‑update.

Desking & F&I

• Time to pencil, time in the box, document defect rates.
• Fund time and contract in transit days.

Marketing

• MQL to appointment rate, cost per kept appointment.
• Opt in growth and reply rates across channels.

What your people can do with the time saved

• Sales make one more meaningful conversation per hour. That’s compounding math.
• Advisors call customers with updates, before customers call them. Instant CSI boost.
• Managers spend less time hunting data and more time coaching.
• BDC clean up comms so customers feel seen, instead of just patronized.

AI Adoption missteps you want to avoid

• Buying platforms before building habits. Start with one use case, not a “stack.”
• Over automating the personal touch. Use AI to set people up—not to arbitrarily replace them.
• Skipping change management. Train, check in, retrain. Make it part of the cadence.
• Measuring everything and learning nothing. Pick the few metrics you’re willing to act on, and don’t lose sight.

Focus on the customer connection and win the AI race

AI is not the strategy. It’s a force multiplier for your strategy.

Car dealers that want to win in their market will treat AI as adaptive cruise-control, a co-pilot, rather than an autopilot. They will remove repetitive work. They will reinforce the human skills that make retail automotive great.

The advantage will go to dealers, and industry partners, who adopt and offer solutions that have purpose, This will allow them to protect their customer relationships, and never lose sight of the people who make it all happen.

What’s next in this space?

The most useful AI won’t just feel like another app. It will feel like a teammate.

The goal should not be Autonomous retail– which is a system that doesn’t really need dealers, or their partners, or many OEM’s for that matter. The real goal should be an augmented dealership where consistency and speed go up, and the human connection gets stronger.

At Solera, we are working to build for that future with a dealer first (and people first) view of the market.