On today’s edition of CBT Live, Mike Yates, General Manager of BMW of Bridgewater, joins us to discuss how he builds AI tools in-house and keeps his team involved. Adapting to new technology is nothing new for Yates who worked in I.T. prior to his career in automotive sales.
Yates’s first tool was a custom GPT loaded with BMW’s warranty policy and procedures manual. Any employee can ask a coverage question without going to the warranty administrator. Service advisors adopted it first, so he added wording for telling customers why the work isn’t covered. Other dealerships now use it too. Yates says he now runs many agents at once, including in his business development center and on internet lead responses.
Efficiency is the goal at his family-owned, single-point store with 70 employees. Yates says he has been clear with his team that artificial intelligence is not a tool to reduce headcount but to save time. That time saved then goes toward customers, coaching co-workers and getting home on time to family.
Yates also built a tool that scores how large language models see his dealership. The idea came from a best-idea session in his AI-focused dealer 20 group. The tool showed him that these models pull reputation scores from review sites and Reddit. It’s a more honest look, Yates says, because dealers cannot buy a good reputation score with artificial intelligence at the moment.
Dealers unsure where to start can ask artificial intelligence to interview them about their brand voice. The process runs until AI is 95% certain it can match that voice, and the saved document guides future work, Yates said.
