Our recent webinar focused on AI for automotive retailers. In particular, we shone a spotlight on AI for customer acquisition.
The session, hosted by Keyloop’s Jacqui Barker, brought four perspectives to the table. Anson Moniz, VP Product at Keyloop, Antony Roberts of Full Fathom Five, Gijs de Groot CEO of PromptWatch and Matt Flitton, Marketing Manager at Slip End Garages.
They came at it from different angles and landed in the same place. AI for automotive retailers isn’t won by adding more tools. It comes from connecting the ones you already have.
More AI doesn’t fix a fragmented journey
Most retailers don’t have an AI problem. They have a fragmentation problem.
Every point solution added to a disconnected process solves its own use case and inherits the same broken foundations. The merchandising tool doesn’t know what the engagement tool has learned. The engagement tool can’t see what attribution is measuring. The customer feels every one of those seams.
McKinsey puts numbers on it. Of all the changes linked to generative AI success, fundamental workflow redesign correlates most strongly with impact on earnings. Yet only 21% of organisations using generative AI have redesigned any workflows at all. The rest are layering AI on top of how they already work.
“The most successful retailers won’t be the ones with the longest list of AI tools. They’ll be the ones with the most connected strategy.”
Anson Moniz
Basically, modern day retailers simply need:
- a single view of the customer
- consistent information across every channel
- data that moves between systems without being retyped.
Without those, more AI simply means more places for the journey to break.
AI is compressing research, not removing the human
Consumers reach you further down the journey than they used to, and they get there faster. Cars.com found 44% of shoppers have used AI search tools to research a vehicle. What’s more, 97% of those users expect it to shape their next purchase.
What that research doesn’t do is remove the retailer. The same study found shoppers still turn to dealers for finance and the final decision.
“The customer hasn’t stopped needing us. They’re just arriving to us in a better place.”
Matt Flitton
The job has changed rather than shrunk. Someone who has compared three brands, read your reviews and shortlisted two of your cars doesn’t need a brochure. They need a person who can pick up the thread where they left it, which only works if your team can see what the customer has already done.
This is where customer experience in the automotive industry is heading. Research and relationship now run side by side, not one after the other.
The real opportunity is responsiveness
Customer experience in the automotive industry has become a key challenge in recent years. Roughly half of browsing now happens outside working hours. A consumer researching at 22:00 on a Friday isn’t waiting until the following Tuesday for a response.
“Every hour you wait, we see the conversion rate reduced by 3%.”
Anson Moniz
The principle is long established. Harvard Business Review found firms contacting a lead within an hour were nearly seven times more likely to qualify it than those waiting just an hour longer, and more than 60 times more likely than those who waited a day.
This is where AI-powered engagement earns its place. Not to replace the salesperson, but to keep the conversation open. Dealership AI assistants like AIME responds out of hours using live vehicle data, asks the questions that establish what someone actually wants, and hands a qualified conversation to the team in the morning.
Consumers no longer compare retailers on stock and price alone. They compare experiences, and availability is now part of the experience.
Better data creates better decisions
“AI gives us the opportunity to [link our data] for the first time. But it will only do it if that data is good data.”
Antony Roberts
Measurement got harder before it got easier. Around 68% of Google searches now end without a click, so the signals marketers have justified budget with for 15 years are thinning out.
“Step one is really to start with measurement.”
Gijs de Groot
That means three things: knowing where you appear in AI search, whether you appear accurately, and what happens to the people who do arrive. Citation and visibility tracking answers the first two. Performance intelligence and source attribution answer the third, showing which channels produce enquiries and which of those enquiries convert. Acquisition Hub brings that into one view rather than six separate reports.
AI that saves time creates better experiences
Retailers often frame AI as a cost saving. The panel consistently framed the value of AI for automotive retailers as time itself.
Matt Flitton described manufacturer campaign season as “12 hours in a very dark room”. Retail, business, light commercial vehicle, motability, ageing stock, special finance. That’s now a few hours, with offers built against stock he can actually deliver. Merchandising follows the same pattern. Phyron produces vehicle video once and it runs across the website and social channels, so listings go live faster and present consistently everywhere. That’s the shape a dealership digital retailing platform should take: one asset, built once, live everywhere a shopper looks.
The question that follows is a management one, not a technical one. Once AI gives your team their week back, what do you choose to spend it on?
The goal isn’t more AI
The retailers creating the best acquisition experiences aren’t chasing every tool that appears. They’re building journeys where inventory, conversations, customer data, attribution and human expertise work together, so each one makes the next more effective.
That’s difficult to assemble from six suppliers who don’t share data. It’s straightforward when the merchandising, the conversations, the attribution and the customer record sit on one automotive retail platform, built to connect rather than to compete for the same journey.
AI is the enabler. Connection is the differentiator.
See it for yourself
Watch the full AI for Acquisition webinar on demand for the panel on future-proofing an acquisition strategy without betting on a dealership digital retailing platform. See how propensity scoring works once it’s connected to every channel, and the live audience poll results. Or go straight to Acquisition Hub and request a demo to see how it could work for your own data.
