Car sales, to the buyer at least, haven’t changed all that much since Henry Ford first rolled out the Model T. The sector is long established, with many dealerships in Ireland having decades of heritage.
It’s a human business. One that involves talking to customers, assessing vehicles, deciding what stock to buy and avoid, and, of course, closing sales. On the face of it, this is hardly the poster child for disruption by artificial intelligence (AI).
Yet AI is making an impact, with several Irish companies at the forefront of that movement, with Irish dealers embracing the time benefits that come with deploying AI agents.
“It’s an age-old problem. Leads aren’t responded to quickly enough and they’re not followed up regularly enough,” says Shaun Donnellan, founder of AutoAgent, a company that develops AI agents for dealerships. “Dealerships are too busy, salespeople have huge amounts of paperwork and prep to do along with getting cars from A to B, and much more.
“AutoAgent helps with a lot of that because it handles the mundane side of selling to the customer. The precious commodity for customers is time. When I started selling cars in 2012, they had far more time to come in and do things. Today, people have so little time that they visit less than two dealerships per purchase on average.”
Speed matters in this sector and anywhere in the process where hours or even minutes can be saved is crucial. By the time a buyer is looking at dealerships to engage with, they’ve usually already narrowed down what they want from Google searches.
For the dealership, the goal is to capture and keep the buyer’s attention while their interest is at its peak.
“The customer wants the car. There are probably a few versions of the car available. The first person that responds and captures their time will most likely bring them in and sell them the car,” he says.
Donnellan has already worked with Tony Burke Motors to roll out his AI agents, with the agent having a direct impact on sales.
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“Tony has already been a leader for technology in the sector. When I came to him with this, he leaned into it hard. It booked nine appointments for his dealership in July, with five of those turning into sales,” says Donnellan.
AutoAgent deployed Aran, its bespoke agent, with Tony Burke Motors to engage with customers when humans weren’t on hand.
“It’s a response optimisation platform that responds to customers and captures their interest while it’s at its peak. It never takes time off, is never sick, and responds the way your dealership wants with your process,” he says.
What Donnellan is doing is reflecting the wider benefit of AI agents to the auto dealership sector, according to Muireann Heaney, an AI engineer with AI One.
“If you look at a company like AutoAgent, they’ve identified the point in the sales cycle of where issues come up. What they’ve done is realise the information is there and focus on keeping the customer interested for the dealerships,” says Heaney.
“With dealerships, getting the engagement from customers at the start is critical for them. That way the customer knows the dealership is interested and wants to give them information that can help their buying decision.”
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There is, however, the old adage of more haste, less speed. A classic misuse of AI is getting the fastest answer possible rather than the best one.
“Speed isn’t the major concern because a normal consumer is willing to wait a few seconds. They are focused mostly on accurate and relevant information that they can verify. A fast answer doesn’t always mean it’s a good answer,” says Janet Xiu Shi, an AI quality evaluation adviser.
Of course, trial runs and small roll-outs are one thing. Once AI use goes into full usage within any business, somebody has to be in charge of what it is and isn’t permitted to do. The car dealership sector is no exception.
“From a business perspective, leadership needs to know how to measure AI effectiveness and who takes accountability for it. Operationally, the team needs to know what AI is and isn’t allowed to use as well as being able to evaluate its output,” says Xiu Shi.
That’s why companies like TradeBid have embraced a hybrid approach. The company uses AI to help assess trade-ins but also knows that mistakes can be made. Low-confidence cases automatically get escalated to be looked over by human eyes.
“On the inspection side, because our business relies on the accuracy of AI, we have to make sure the information is as good as possible. Where the confidence is too low on the AI side, we bring in people to take a look,” says Conor O’Boyle, co-founder of TradeBid.
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The value goes beyond the individual sale to the broader decisions that a dealership wants to make. AI’s value goes beyond customer service work – indeed, quite a lot of it isn’t customer facing at all. It can aid dealerships working out what vehicles to acquire and how quickly they will sell.
“Dealers often complain to us that they don’t have enough time to know what they should be buying. We have so much data that we take retail feeds and analyse it to provide dealers with more discoverability so they can turn over cars faster.”
Time remains at the heart of the problem for dealerships wherever you look. It’s why James Flynn’s Coso.ai is working with them to free that up. His business uses AI to reduce the time spent by businesses on social media.
“Creating content takes a lot of time. Beyond just writing, you’re creating images, graphic design, video editing and more. A week’s worth of content for a business usually takes half a day’s work for them. We cut that down to 15 or 20 minutes on a Friday morning,” says O’Flynn.
That time on a Friday morning, or whatever day, is crucial to a service like Coso.ai working, he says.
James Flynn’s business Coso.ai uses AI to reduce the time businesses spend on social media
“Where you need to watch out is that you don’t necessarily want a full autopilot, because it’s AI, but you want it specific to your brand,” he says.
“Around 90 per cent of businesses don’t have a dedicated social media marketer. We do that element to free up time for people. We’re not putting anyone out of a job, we’re taking a functionality that previously only existed in large companies and putting it into the hands of small and medium businesses across the country.”
The biggest advocates for AI in industry have long cried out that AI will assist workers rather than replace them. A sector as human-centric as car sales might well be the best use-case for those advocates.
Where the disruption is happening is centred around freeing up time for those working in the industry to focus on what they do best, and deliver the most value to the sector.
“AI agents allow the humans in the company to go back to what they are good at. It means they can meet more people in person per day because they have that first step taken care of,” says Heaney.
“The key thing is operational leverage. Nobody wants AI all the time, we like human interaction, but automating the parts of your business that are repeatable operations is where we’ll see the biggest difference.”