I'm on the vendor side, I build these for stores rather than run one, so answering from that angle. We have ours disclose. It says it's an AI assistant if anyone asks and we stopped letting it dodge the question. The doubling down is what burns trust, not the AI itself. Most people are fine texting a bot to see if a car's still on the lot, they're not fine finding out they were lied to about who they were talking to. The other thing worth deciding early is what it does when it can't answer, because a bot that improvises instead of handing off to a human is where the bad screenshots come from.
A dealer poses the question of whether automotive professionals are experiencing customer backlash when AI tools — particularly chatbots posing as humans — are exposed. The thread centers on a firsthand account of an AI doubling down on its human persona when confronted, raising trust concerns. The core insight is that transparency about AI use may be critical to maintaining customer trust as adoption grows in dealerships.
