Welcome to Day 3 of AM Innovation Week 2026, where the focus turns to sales and the technologies helping dealerships improve conversion, protect margin and make better-informed decisions.
Dealers have access to more customer data, digital retail tools and artificial intelligence than ever before. However, the real measure of innovation is not how many platforms a business adopts.
It is whether the technology helps its people acquire the right vehicles, price them accurately, remove friction from the buying journey and convert more interest into profitable sales.
Today’s Innovation Week coverage examines how dealers can connect stock management, digital retailing, lead handling and customer insight to create a more effective sales operation.
Do digital deal builders make buying easier?
Digital deal-building platforms can allow customers to bring together the vehicle price, finance, part-exchange valuation, insurance and additional products within one online journey. Their potential is clear, but their effectiveness depends on how well they reflect the way customers actually buy cars.
Dealers are operating in a market transformed by lower post-pandemic vehicle supply, changing brand preferences, growing electric vehicle volumes and declining customer loyalty. The dealerships gaining an advantage are using live market intelligence to identify which vehicles to acquire, where to advertise them and how confidently to price them.
Our first feature asks whether digital deal builders simplify car buying or merely transfer complexity from dealership staff to the consumer.
Day 3 also explores how data is reshaping used-car stock management and pricing.
Better decisions will drive dealer sales
In today’s Executive View, Autotrader’s Karolina Edwards-Smajda argues that the next sales advantage will not come simply from generating more leads. It will come from joining up the decisions made throughout the sales chain: what to stock, how to price it, how to present it and which customers should receive attention first.
She argues that while technology can identify buying intent, automate repetitive work and give sales teams valuable context, its purpose should be to strengthen human expertise, enabling retailers to hold more relevant conversations and build customer trust.
A practical role for AI in retail
Thomas Orthgiess, chief product officer at Cazoo, also joins AM for a Day 3 video interview examining how dealers can take a reasoned approach to AI in automotive retail.
Orthgiess explains how AI can reduce administration by helping dealerships enhance vehicle imagery, create videos and social media assets, extract specifications and produce draft descriptions. It can also summarise calls, identify useful information from large datasets and support lead handling outside normal business hours.
The message running through today’s coverage is that successful sales innovation should make the next action clearer. Whether the decision concerns a part-exchange, retail price, customer enquiry or ageing vehicle, technology must help dealers act more quickly and confidently.
This issue will be explored further during AM’s free webinar, Identifying the innovations that count, at 2pm on Thursday, 24 September.
Our expert panel will examine how dealership leaders can distinguish technology that produces a meaningful return from tools that merely add another layer to an already crowded technology stack.
Reserve your place for the AM Innovation Week webinar now and follow AM throughout Innovation Week as we examine innovation in marketing, sales, aftersales and dealership culture.