Dealerships need to rethink their business model.

[DjSec]

Consider this:

✔ Interest rates are rising.

✔ Car prices are rising.

✔ Companies are downsizing.

✔ Wages are shrinking.

✔ Politicians are maximizing fear by talking about war, tariffs, chip shortages and the talk is choking supply chains.

✔ Meanwhile, gas and food prices keep climbing.


And while all of this is happening…

OEMs are daydreaming about shipping self-driving cars directly to the consumer, cutting out the dealership entirely.

Ride-sharing keeps growing.

Trust in dealerships?

That well’s gone dry.

Consumers are tired of:

✔ Greasy handshakes

✔ Shady pricing

✔ Haggling for the best deal

New players are winning.

✔ No inventory.

✔ Just platforms, clean code, and global demand.

This isn’t just an inventory battle.

It’s a platform war.

And right now... the platforms are winning.

Meanwhile, the average dealership website?

Slow load times (some close to a full minute)

Bloated code

Endless errors

Poor UX

Bad SEO

And customers notice!
Am I wrong?
Does AI change the game and give dealerships a fighting?

Curious to hear your thoughts.

 

[Jamieshap]

Honestly, my thoughts will sound counter intuitive. I have watched as technology has slowly depersonalized, both selling and buying cars. Dealers increasingly the rely on systems like BDC's CRM's apps to pick up the slack that used to be part of the relationship process in our business. Just try calling a dealership and getting in touch with a specific person. It's almost impossible whether that person is your sales person or your service person. It's an exercise that creates insanity.

I believe AI, which is obviously an emerging technology, can revolutionize our process, by giving the humans more time insights and understandings to form deeper relationships with our clients. Trying to get Dealer decision maker to understand this is like trying to break through a bank vault. They understand, chat bots, and automated replacement systems for human beings, but they don't understand that human beings equipped with these new tools can do work faster and more meaningfully then they ever could in the past.

AI is not just a super Google. It's an assistant, coach, counselor and creator, just waiting for you to use it. No matter how much we try to dress ourselves up and make ourselves feel complicated we are still messy two legged animals that for the most part like to talk to each other and feel heard and understood. No one ever feels heard or understood when they talk to a BDC.

 

[DjSec]

Honestly, my thoughts will sound counter intuitive. I have watched as technology has slowly depersonalized, both selling and buying cars. Dealers increasingly the rely on systems like BDC's CRM's apps to pick up the slack that used to be part of the relationship process in our business. Just try calling a dealership and getting in touch with a specific person. It's almost impossible whether that person is your sales person or your service person. It's an exercise that creates insanity.

I believe AI, which is obviously an emerging technology, can revolutionize our process, by giving the humans more time insights and understandings to form deeper relationships with our clients. Trying to get Dealer decision maker to understand this is like trying to break through a bank vault. They understand, chat bots, and automated replacement systems for human beings, but they don't understand that human beings equipped with these new tools can do work faster and more meaningfully then they ever could in the past.

AI is not just a super Google. It's an assistant, coach, counselor and creator, just waiting for you to use it. No matter how much we try to dress ourselves up and make ourselves feel complicated we are still messy two legged animals that for the most part like to talk to each other and feel heard and understood. No one ever feels heard or understood when they talk to a BDC.

100% agree, somewhere along the way, technology started replacing relationships instead of enhancing them.

You're spot on, when someone calls a dealership and gets lost in the endless BDC loop, it doesn’t build trust. It feels robotic, frustrating, and disconnected.

AI should be a tool to empower humans, not replace them.

Give the salespeople, the service writers, and the managers more time, more insight, and better tools to actually serve people.

The dealers that figure this out, that AI isn’t a chatbot, it’s an assistant, coach, and multiplier will dominate. The ones that treat AI like just another autoresponder will get left behind.

---

Curious... if you were running a store today, what’s the first thing you’d apply AI to?