AI is not the answer. If AI is the answer, then what are we all doing on this site? Why bother reading about the new and latest. The robots can do it then we should all start looking for new jobs now. That's not happening anytime soon.
I think you might misunderstand my perspective on AI. AI is a tool, like the telephone and the internet, with a usefulness that fills a certain space. Will AI replace humans? I think in every space that is repetitive, mundane and time consuming-- yes... or, at least, mostly. If you have a BDC that is well trained enough to warm leads, answer questions about smoke in cars, and handle objections about trade and credit, you have a BDC full of knowledgeable and skillful salespeople. Maybe our dealership is incredibly ill-advanced, because outside of a handful of a high-performers, most of our actual sales people couldn't perform all of those tasks on demand for the majority of the 150 used vehicles on the used portion of our lot.
If you can get trained quality people to work a BDC, meet or exceed key KPIs, and do it for a cost that returns a clear and provable ROI, keep on doing it. I'd love to hear more details from dealers that are using BDCs well, because everyone that I have spoken to about it seems underwhelmed by the value they provide-- something I recognize about the difficulty of putting together and managing an BDC in the most effective way for each dealership or dealer group. I have yet to talk to anyone that has a BDC that works the way that I suspect one should.
Nearly everyone that I have talked to about BDCs seem to fall into one of two versions: a bank of phone jockeys that can do little more that follow a script and say, "I'll have to have my Internet Manager get back to you on that." or a hybrid BDC that basically takes the tasks of a BDC and distributes it to salespeople, which from what I gather, isn't very efficient and is very difficult to manage, especially when things are busy and salespeople have real people in front of their faces-- that's the reality that causes us to constantly discuss new options that don't require hiring, training and managing a new workforce or hiring a virtual BDC which can be little more that door warmers and information gatherers-- something that AI is largely capable of doing, even at this point in its evolution.
I spoke to a GM recently who told me the biggest bang they have ever gotten was choosing a product called Conversica which uses AI to help warm doors and get leads engaged, something that exhausts the average salesperson who only targets the lowest hanging fruit and is one of the biggest time-sucks of the sales BDC. That GM dumped their sales BDC and threw all that budget at technology that does all of the irritating and repetitive tasks that no one likes to do and uses the sales people to do all the difficult appointment closing and selling.
I don't think that doing something like that has to require the complete elimination of BDCs, I think as a resource, a BDC can serve an important business purpose. However, I think that the more tools and technology can remove the time consuming and repetitive tasks from the BDC team, the more they can hone the specific skills of getting the appointment and focusing purely on doing that with leads and customers that have been cultivated by AI-powered technology.
All that to say, I don't think AI can be a 1:1 replacement for the functions of the BDC, but I think technologies powered by AI will likely change how the BDC spends it's time and focuses on it's skills-development, making it more efficient.