FordDirect Selects Numa as Strategic Engagement AI Vendor for Ford Dealers and Lincoln Retailers

Numa, the AI operating system built for modern dealership operations, today announced that FordDirect has selected Numa as a strategic AI vendor, bringing enterprise AI across voice, messaging and dealership workflows to Ford dealers and Lincoln retailers nationwide. More than 170 Ford dealers and Lincoln retailers are already running Numa today and now FordDirect's selection opens the program to all dealers.

AI is rapidly reshaping how dealerships talk to customers, and FordDirect solutions are built specifically for dealership operations. The stakes are real with the average dealership losing an estimated $1.17M in annual revenue¹ from missed service calls and taking nearly 23 hours to respond to a customer. Numa closes those gaps, cutting average response time to just 13 minutes and making sure no customer interaction falls through the cracks.

But speed alone isn't what sets Numa apart. Where most AI tools stop at answering a call or a text, Numa was built as a full system of action: one system that unifies live voice, shared context and live customer sentiment, so nothing about a customer's history or mood gets lost between a phone call, a text thread and a service bay. Every agent inside Numa works from the same real-time picture of the customer: their full history, their current sentiment, and the right next step, every time.

"Dealers don't need another disconnected AI tool bolted onto their day," said Tasso Roumeliotis, founder and CEO of Numa. "They need a system that actually understands automotive retail, works inside the workflows they already run, and tells them the moment a customer relationship is at risk, before it's too late. That's the promise of LiveCSI™, and it's why we built Numa the way we did. We're proud FordDirect is putting that promise in front of more Ford dealers and Lincoln retailers."

LiveCSI™ is Numa's proprietary real-time sentiment engine. Instead of finding out about an unhappy customer weeks later in a CSI survey, LiveCSI™ reads sentiment as it happens, across every call and text, and flags at-risk "heat cases" the moment they surface, so dealership teams can step in and save the relationship while it's still salvageable. LiveCSI™ catches the fall before the score drops, turning a dealership's slowest-moving feedback loop into one of its fastest.

That real-time intelligence is powered by scale. Numa has handled more than 1 billion calls³ across the dealerships it serves, the depth of context that makes its AI sharp and dealership-specific rather than generic.

“Nearly 40% of customer leads occur outside traditional operating hours, making immediate, 24/7 responsiveness critical to our network’s performance and growth,” said Chris Thornton, CEO of FordDirect. “Welcoming Numa to our Service AI Engagement lineup brings AI-powered engagement capabilities together with the data and customer insights FordDirect delivers across the Ford and Lincoln ecosystem. This unique combination helps dealers better understand customer behavior, identify opportunities earlier, personalize engagement throughout the ownership journey, and improve performance across service.”

FordDirect will offer dealerships access to Numa's full integrated platform: AI-powered voice and text communications, real-time appointment scheduling, intelligent lead capture, multilingual customer support, a shared live team inbox, and workflow automation that plugs directly into the systems dealers already run every day.

Numa merges with the dealership technology already on the lot, including Tekion, CDK, Reynolds & Reynolds, DealerFX, Xtime, DealerBuilt, PBS and Dealertrack, so dealers can adopt AI without ripping out what already works. Combined with the FordDirect dealer network and customer engagement reach, AI engagement solutions will help dealers respond faster, recover missed opportunities, convert more appointments, and protect the ownership experience from the first call to the last mile of service.

Numa has experienced significant momentum over the last year. The company recently surpassed 1,300 dealership customers, tripled annual recurring revenue, and expanded its system across sales and fixed operations, reinforcing its place as one of the fastest-growing AI systems built specifically for automotive retail. Following its acquisition of Ficus, Numa broadened its AI capabilities across dealership sales and service, advancing its vision of the AI-native dealership. FordDirect's selection marks another milestone and a vote of confidence in Numa's approach from one of the industry's most trusted names.