Artificial intelligence is already used in many industries, and its applications and developments are changing quickly. Dealerships need to get onboard fast, speakers at Dave Foy’s recent Automotive Mastermind Automotive AI Summit 2025 say.

As the webinar’s presenters make clear, the benefits of AI to a dealership extend far beyond simply helping answer every phone call or sending service updates. AI is likely helping dealerships in ways they may not even be aware of.

The Time Is Now

AI is coming at us at warp speed, says Sharon Gai, a keynote speaker on AI and innovation. In the “Commerce at Warp Speed: Tactics Dealers can Deploy in Service and Parts” session, Gai summons a vision of a drone that already knows the customer’s habits so well it automatically delivers goods from a shop.

“The shop doesn’t offer a return policy because its algorithm will never fail,” says Gai. This type of predictive delivery is already being tested in China, she adds.

At the most basic level, dealerships must keep up with AI advances to optimize their website effectiveness, says Gai. She compares the dealership business model to other industries, including furniture and jewelry stores, real estate companies and luxury retail.

All are trying to get to know their customers online so they can pull them into an offline space, in this case, the dealership showroom.

The industries have used AI to attract more customers in three ways, says Gai. First, AI is used in discovery, using techniques such as search engine optimization to boost website visits. “AI is instrumental in helping build discovery,” says Gai.

AI also aids in personalization, which Gai defines as the right message at the right time. “How do we lock people in and capture them at the right time? That is personalization,” she says.

Finally, AI assists in lifecycle marketing – proactively getting the previous customer to return. “How do I get them back into my store?” is the question AI helps answer, says Gai.

Chatbots Are Learning

Chatbots are the AI tool that dealerships are likely most familiar with. To be sure, as Nathan Shaver, general manager of Shaver Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram in southern California, attests, chatbots can fail. His dealership’s bot, which they named Kyle, offended customers by not responding to their calls.

Shaver has not given up on AI, however. He pledges to try it again after a pause.

That’s the right approach because multiple companies are offering sophisticated chatbot tools and they are getting better all the time, says Gai.

Dealers need to track all the major chatbot providers to stay on top of the game because “chatbots are becoming smarter and learning how to reason,” she says.

AI Everywhere

Rude chatbots aside, 68% of auto dealerships report that AI has positively impacted their operations, including better achieving financial objectives, boosting customer satisfaction and improving internal workflows, according to CDK’s AI in Automotive: Insights and Innovations Survey 2024.

CDK Research surveyed 241 executives and department heads of North American auto dealerships in April 2024.

The survey found 52% of those surveyed have considered incorporating AI solutions into their dealership’s operations and 65% of dealerships not using AI expect it to have a positive impact.

But AI may already be positively impacting their business through other channels.

Dealerships are using a mobile service platform provided by Spiffy – On Demand Car Care to start and quickly grow a whole new business area – mobile service, says Connor Finnegan, Spiffy’s chief product and strategy officer, presenting in the “What Happens When Mobile Becomes a Strategy, Not a Silo?” session.

Many dealers still treat mobile service as a favor offered to customers, or as an extension of the service department, says Finnegan.

“That mindset fails because it lacks structure, ownership and vision,” he says. “Mobile service is a brand-new business model and a lucrative one if treated strategically.”

Spiffy uses an AI-powered tech stack to power a dealership’s mobile operations, including scheduling and dispatch, route optimization, recall management and many other tasks. It even tracks if technicians deploy the mandatory wash and drip mats. But, Finnegan says, “AI is the amplifier, not the strategy.”

Dealers who invest in mobile the right way “will stretch beyond their primary marketing area and will start to steal market share from competitors,” he says.

Taking Gut Instinct out of Trade-In Appraisal

AI also turbocharges dealerships’ ability to accurately appraise vehicle trade-ins by taking “gut instinct” out of the process.

Service departments most often use automatic vehicle inspection company UVeye’s scanning device to inspect a vehicle that has come in for service to check for undercarriage problems and to catch unseen scratches and dents.

But its use of AI to detect those dents by scanning over 1 million cars a month has helped UVeye develop another offering that helps managers on the variable side, as well, says Omer Bar-Joseph, UVeye’s chief revenue officer, during the “Computer Vision in the Service Lane: Safety, Trust, ROI” session.

“We recommend scanning 100% of (vehicle) trade-ins with UVeye,” says Bar-Joseph.

A dealership has access to the full scan in seconds, he says, and can see issues that might go unnoticed otherwise.

That moves the trade-in estimate from a “random” number to one that more precisely reflects the vehicle’s condition, says Bar-Joseph.

“In the pre-UVeye world, the best case is a walk-around and taking notes of what the sales manager can see,” he says. “But a lot of damage was missed.”

UVeye’s system can calculate reconditioning costs and access market value information, making the trade-in offer more precise for the dealer and providing more transparency for the customer, says Bar-Joseph.

Quality Images on Day One

It can take a week or more for a dealer to get a quality photo of a used car up on a dealership website. AI is speeding that up.

UVeye’s scans produce hundreds of images of a vehicle. Dealers asked if those images could be used for merchandising photos, says Bar-Joseph.

The images could be stitched together, but they still lacked refinement in the background and other features. So, UVEye employed AI to clean up the images. Now, “We can give merchandising-level images on day one from multiple angles, he says.

A dealership needs to think broadly about how AI can be used, says Bar-Joseph. “It can change the way they run the business.”