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A.I. ain't A.I. in automotive. It is B.S.

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#71
I have sooo many examples of AI that has gone wrong at dealerships, most too saucy to post without some heavy editing.

I'm still a traditionalist in this business and believe that people buy cars from people. When we start letting IF/TT processes make decisions for our business, we might as well shutter our doors and turn ourselves into a vending machine. You don't need a test drive, just watch the video. You don't need someone to approve your subprime paper, just make sure you attract the right mix of customer to your digital retailing website.

I spend so much time driving cars (easily 30K miles in any given year), what makes anyone think that we can replace well trained sales staff with auto responders? That's just lazy management, in my opinion. Buying vehicles is an emotional experience for most people. You can't robot your way out of that.
 
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#73
orkidehouston said:
You can't robot your way out of that.
Click to expand...

@joe.pistell and I were on the phone earlier talking about how few product managers have dealership experience. It feels like so much of what technologists focus on is driven by some bad car buying experience that can all be solved by more tech. The thing is so many of these product managers do not realize it takes a human to sell a car to another human because car buying is emotional.

Digital retailing is the perfect example of the absence of the human touch that gets the customer over that last mile. In that technology, a shopper enters the digital retailing "tunnel" to enter a trade, credit, downpayment, and is then presented with numbers. I would be so bold to predict the number of people coming out the other end of the tunnel to buy a car is on par with the number of people who are laydowns on the floor. Most aren't. Most need a second or third or fourth pass to hear "this is our best deal!" Or the one price store personnel to give the customer that final pat on the butt saying "you are making a good decision."

So, I'll leave this for the techies building product for car dealers: emotional people need emotional salespeople to make buying decisions. If you apply logic and reason to a car deal, you ain't selling a lot of cars.
 
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#74
Tech Disruption is simple. It comes from removing friction from tasks.

This is what friction looks like thru the shoppers journey:
  • "over 605,000 different vehicle configurations were built in 2019" --JD Power.
  • Next, add personal payments to over 605,000 different vehicle configurations
And technologists wondered why I was so anti-DR since it's inception? [face palm]

Too many technologists see the dealership as friction, when in-fact, the friction comes from weak websites, indusrty-wide, made by well-meaning and incredibly busy technologists that don't fully comprehend the complexity of car shopping at its roots and over-index on THEIR OWN negotiation fears. Ugh.

To understand the shopper, we technologists must drop preconceptions of the urban legend and ask why 34million dealership sales happen annually and the post-sale feedback (JDPower) is quite favorable.


p.s. for those outside of the tech vendor space that think technology is easy... it aint.
 
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#76
Todd Thomspon said:
Absolutely the truth!
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I too have been a nay-sayer... but no longer.

I use GPT a lot. And there is zero doubt we are right around the corner from AI having more relevant, meaningful conversations with customers than we can hope from our Sales staff. Not a chat bot -- suggest inventory, help with payments, compare and contrast; it's wide-open...

I almost hate saying it... but unlike L5 autonomous driving, or EV's being half as practical as gas or hybrids, AI is here, it's not going anywhere, and it's real.
 
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#77
john.quinn said:
I too have been a nay-sayer... but no longer.

I use GPT a lot. And there is zero doubt we are right around the corner from AI having more relevant, meaningful conversations with customers than we can hope from our Sales staff. Not a chat bot -- suggest inventory, help with payments, compare and contrast; it's wide-open...

I almost hate saying it... but unlike L5 autonomous driving, or EV's being half as practical as gas or hybrids, AI is here, it's not going anywhere, and it's real.
Click to expand...
JQ -- Just for fun, I ran your response through AI. This is what it came up with:
AI is on the verge of surpassing human sales staff in having meaningful conversations with customers. Unlike other technologies, such as autonomous driving or electric vehicles, AI is already here, and its potential is significant.
 
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