I’d bet money that you spent the majority of last week buried in a spreadsheet, chasing the elusive question of where you can take cost out of the dealership, writes Chris Porter, chief executive, Nexbotix.
Or you started the month feeling mithered by the recurring ask to embrace the golden goose of AI, that on paper makes all the promises, but in reality, just gives you a headache.
But what if I told you that one cancels out the other? Let me explain.
Every report out there says that to advance in motor retail, you need AI. It’s how you keep up, so you feel you should have a plan for it. So, you started using it. You opened ChatGPT, asked it something, it wasn’t quite right, so you asked again, and then patched up what it gave you. It helps.
But it’s you doing the work, one prompt at a time. That’s what AI means to most of us now, because that’s the version that crept into everyday life. And, when someone says, “AI strategy,” that’s the picture in your head. No wonder it feels like a lot of effort for a maybe.
AI that runs your dealership
But that’s the AI that writes your emails. Not the AI that runs your dealership. The one that works on the inside, on the boring back-office jobs, and nobody types a thing. It’s not sci-fi. It’s not five years out. It’s in dealerships today. And it’s the straightest answer to that cost question you’ve been losing sleep over. Cutting cost and cracking AI aren’t two jobs. They’re the same job.
So why are adoption rates so low? For years, new tech meant buying another system, and most of them made life harder, not easier. So, the second we hear AI, we flinch and brace for another bill.
And that’s fair enough. But the thing is, the cost was never in the systems.
The gaps in the systems
It’s in the gaps between them. Your systems don’t talk to each other, so your people do. Someone reads a number off one screen and types it into the next. Someone hunts a document across three portals. Someone reconciles by hand what two systems should have sorted out on their own. Walk your dealership’s back office tonight. You’ll see it.
None of it shows up as technology. It shows up as headcount. As month ends that drag. As the invoice you paid twice because nobody caught it. It’s the most expensive software in your building. Except it isn’t software. It’s people, doing by hand what the machines were bought to do.
That cost is sitting in plain sight. And it’s exactly what this quieter, less sexy, AI takes away. It reads the invoice, moves the data, updates the record and nobody touches a keyboard. Arnold Clark took 8,500 hours of manual work out of its invoicing in a single year and never changed a system it already owned.
So yes, the answer is something new. Just not new in the way that’s burned you before. Not another box to buy and babysit. One layer, sitting over the systems you already own, getting them to talk, giving you a dealership that runs leaner because the routine runs itself. And yes, what we build sits over your systems too. The test isn’t new versus old. It’s whether a thing takes work away or piles more on.
The autonomous dealership
Do that everywhere, and you get what we call the autonomous dealership.
The everyday work runs itself, and your people get their time back for the customer in the showroom, not the spreadsheet out the back. You don’t have to get there overnight. You just have to change the question you walk in with on Monday. Not “what’s the newest thing I can buy?” But “what’s the work I can finally stop doing?”
Answer that, one job at a time, and you’ll advance your dealership and cut its costs in the same breath.
Author: Chris Porter, chief executive, Nexbotix
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