Leads don't go cold. They go unanswered.
An AI operating system for dealer groups — first response in seconds, nurture that outlasts the follow-up list, and a service drive that stops missing calls.
Published benchmarks put the average dealer response to an internet lead at around 42 hours, while leads answered inside five minutes close at roughly 32% against 12% after a day — and most buyers simply purchase from whoever replied first. That gap is not a training problem. It is a staffing problem no BDC schedule solves, because leads arrive at 11:40pm on a Sunday and the seventh follow-up is the one nobody makes. We build the operating system that closes it: instant qualified response across every lead source, a nurture cadence that runs for months without fatigue, a voice agent answering the service drive when the phone would otherwise ring out, and equity and lease-maturity outreach that turns the DMS you already pay for into pipeline. Everything writes back to the CRM, so the record stays where your managers already look.
Part of
Automotive & Dealerships is one vertical view of a single system. The layer underneath — retrieval, scoped permissions, evaluation, and the audit trail — is the same one we build in every sector.
Where AI earns its keep.
The workflows in automotive & dealerships where AI does real work today — not a someday roadmap, the jobs it can take off your plate now.
Sub-minute lead response
Every ADF lead, web form, and chat answered in seconds with a real qualifying question — not an auto-responder promising that someone will be in touch.
Nurture that doesn't quit
Multi-channel follow-up running 90 days and beyond, reviving unsold showroom traffic and the dead lead lists the BDC gave up on.
Service-drive voice agent
Answers the calls that currently ring out, checks live bay availability, and books the appointment before the caller hangs up.
Equity & lease-maturity mining
Watches the DMS for positive-equity, high-mileage, and maturing-lease customers, and opens the conversation in the right month.
Don’t take our word. Take the call.
4 of the agents above, live in your browser right now. Pick the job you actually need covered, press call, and talk to it the way your customers would — objections included.
A real call, not a recording. Press call once, then just talk — it hears you stop and answers. No buttons to hold.
This browser can’t capture speech — you can still type your side of the call. Chrome, Edge, or Safari for the full thing.
Live agents on fictional businesses and invented records. Nothing you say or paste here is recorded or stored — it lives in this tab and dies with it. A production deployment runs on your data, your systems, and your policy.
An internet lead, from 11:40pm to a shown appointment
Not a feature list — the mechanism, step by step, from trigger to logged outcome.
Capture
The ADF/XML lead arrives from Autotrader, Cars.com, CarGurus, TrueCar, or the OEM feed and is normalised into one lead record alongside website forms, chat, and inbound calls — so no source is quietly sitting in an inbox nobody watches after 6pm.
Respond
A real reply goes out in seconds on the channel the customer used, referencing the actual vehicle from your live inventory feed. This is the whole ballgame: published research puts roughly four in five buyers with the dealer who responded first.
Qualify
Vehicle interest, trade, timeline, and finance intent are captured conversationally and written into the CRM, so a salesperson opens a qualified opportunity with context instead of a name and a phone number.
Nurture
If they don't reply, the cadence takes over for 90 days and beyond — adapting to each response, staying inside quiet hours and consent state, and pulling only vehicles actually in stock.
Book
The appointment is written into the CRM and the service scheduler, the rep is notified with the full transcript, and the source that produced it is recorded — so the store can tell which lead provider is actually earning its invoice.
Illustrative — the events this system emits, not a log from any client’s production run.
Every part of it. Not the demo part.
The whole operation, workstream by workstream — including the unglamorous pieces that decide whether any of the rest of it works.
Lead capture across every source
Third-party ADF/XML, OEM feeds, website forms, chat, marketplace messages, and inbound phone calls become one normalised lead record. ADF is the format every major automotive CRM already accepts, which is why capture rarely needs a platform migration — it needs someone to stop leads from landing in five different inboxes with five different owners.
First response, measured in seconds
The benchmark that matters is not messages sent, it is median time to first meaningful reply. Under five minutes puts a store in the top quartile and under a minute is the emerging elite standard, against an industry average measured in hours. An always-on agent makes that number a property of the system rather than of who happens to be on shift.
Qualification that produces a real opportunity
A reply that only says thanks for your interest wastes the response-time advantage it just earned. The agent asks the questions a good BDC rep asks — which vehicle, is there a trade, what timeline, cash or finance — and writes the answers into the CRM fields your managers already sort by, so speed converts into a working opportunity rather than a faster dead end.
Long-cycle nurture and dead-lead reactivation
Most car buyers are not ready the week they inquire, and most follow-up stops long before they are. Cadences run for months per lead type, adjusting to replies, pausing on opt-out, and re-engaging aged lists the store has already paid for. Reactivating leads you bought last quarter is the cheapest inventory of intent a dealership owns.
Unsold showroom follow-up
The customer who walked the lot and left is the warmest lead in the building and the one most likely to be forgotten by Thursday. Every unsold up gets a structured follow-up sequence tied to the vehicle they actually looked at, with the salesperson kept in the loop rather than replaced — and a manager view of which ups were followed up at all.
Appointment booking with write-back
An appointment that lives only in a chat transcript is not an appointment. Bookings are written into VinSolutions, Elead, DealerSocket, DriveCentric, or Tekion and into the service scheduler, with confirmation and reminder sequences that reduce no-shows — because appointments set is a vanity number and appointments shown is the one that pays.
The service drive and the phone that rings out
A large share of service appointments still start as a phone call, and calls that ring out at lunchtime are pure lost margin against an average repair order in the hundreds. A voice agent answers overflow and after-hours calls, checks live bay availability, books into Xtime, myKaarma, or the DMS scheduler, and escalates anything diagnostic to an advisor — the retention effect compounds well past the single RO.
Equity mining and lease maturity
The best pipeline in the store is already in the DMS. Positive-equity positions, high-mileage vehicles, maturing leases, and service customers in a payment position to upgrade are surfaced continuously and worked with outreach tied to their specific vehicle and situation — a service-to-sales motion that runs every week instead of whenever someone pulls a list.
Consent, opt-out, and the compliance layer
Consent is system state, not a checkbox on a form. Where it came from, what it covers, and whether it has been revoked travels with the customer across SMS, voice, and email, and the outreach engine checks it before every send. Quiet hours, state DNC, recording-consent rules, and revocation by any reasonable means are enforced centrally — which matters more now that the rules have moved twice in recent years.
Attribution and what actually sold the car
Once response is instant and follow-up is complete, the store can finally ask a clean question: which sources, cadences, and vehicles produce shown appointments and delivered units. We instrument response time, contact rate, appointments set, appointments shown, and closed deals by source — so the lead-provider conversation is settled with data instead of loyalty.
The numbers aren’t ours.
Published industry figures and the rules themselves, each with its source named — this is the gap the build is aimed at, not a claim about our results.
Tell us which part of automotive & dealerships is the bottleneck.
What it will never do.
Enforced outside the model, in the control layer — these are constraints the system can't talk itself out of, not instructions we hope it follows.
- 01Never texts or calls outside permitted hours, and never contacts a customer on your DNC list or one who has opted out.
- 02Honours a revocation made by any reasonable means — a text reply, a key press, or a web request — inside the window the FCC rule requires.
- 03Never claims to be a human. It identifies itself as the dealership's assistant whenever asked.
- 04Never invents inventory. Every vehicle, trim, and availability statement comes from the live feed, or it isn't said.
- 05Never quotes a price, payment, rate, or trade value it was not explicitly authorised to quote — pricing claims are where FTC Act § 5 exposure actually lives.
- 06Never handles customer financial information outside the controls your Safeguards Rule program requires.
- 07Hands to a human on trade appraisal, credit and finance questions, complaints, or any customer who asks for one.
- 08Writes every message, call summary, and appointment back to the CRM — nothing happens off the record.
Built for the rules of your industry.
What it plugs into.
An AI operating system only earns that name if it runs inside the systems you already have — not beside them.
Asked before the contract, not after.
The failure mode you are picturing is a decision-tree chatbot from 2019. What we build answers the actual question, references the actual vehicle from your live feed, and asks one qualifying question a good BDC rep would ask. It also identifies itself as the dealership's assistant when asked — not because it sounds better, but because pretending otherwise is how a store ends up in a complaint. The target is not passing for human; it is appointments set and shown.
It replaces the part of the BDC that is a stopwatch. Sub-minute first response, the sixth and ninth follow-up, after-hours coverage, and dead-lead reactivation are volume work that a person does worse as the day goes on. Your people should be handling engaged customers, trade conversations, and the phone call that saves a deal. Most stores keep their BDC and simply stop losing leads to nights, weekends, and the industry-average response time.
That is the part we are actually good at. Leads arrive by ADF/XML — the format every major automotive CRM already accepts — and activity, notes, transcripts, and appointments write back into VinSolutions, Elead, DealerSocket, DriveCentric, or Tekion. Where a documented API exists we use it; where it does not, we use the integration paths the platform supports rather than pretending a rip-and-replace is on the table. Service bookings land in Xtime, myKaarma, or the DMS scheduler.
It is real and it is manageable, and the ground moved in both directions recently: the FCC's one-to-one consent rule was vacated in January 2025, while rules requiring businesses to honour a revocation made by any reasonable means took effect that April. We treat consent as system state rather than a form field — where it came from, what it covers, and whether it has been revoked travels with the customer record across SMS, voice, and email, and the outreach engine checks it before every send.
It is the stronger case. Rooftops share lead sources, CRM tenancy, and the same follow-up gaps, so one operating system deploys across the group with per-store routing, inventory, and hours. Group management finally gets response time and appointment-set rates that are comparable store to store, rather than reconstructed from five reports that count things differently.
We instrument it before we launch it. Median first-response time, contact rate, appointments set, appointments shown, and closed deals by lead source — measured against your own trailing numbers, not an industry average. If appointments shown do not move, the build is not finished, and we would rather tell you that than hand you a dashboard of messages sent.
Let's put AI to work in your business.
A 30-minute call. You bring the workflow or the roadmap — we'll tell you what's feasible, what it costs, and what we'd build first.