CBT Automotive is joined today by Bill Leek, the head of national accounts at Dominion Dealer Solutions to discuss the new buzzwords in automotive, artificial intelligence.
To apply AI in product solutions, you first need to look at the digital journey of a customer as well as their shopping behaviors. Switching from a last-click attribution model to a multi-click one, means machines are learning how to understand consumer and employee behavior better.
With most people carrying mobile phones nowadays, calling into the dealership allows programs like Google’s Cloud and IBM’s Watson to take a voice, convert it to text, and then analyze it. This makes for a clean transparency of data from the digital side to a dealership.
Once these communication channels become transparent, they can be applied across the dealership to understand behavior. Using the analytics of an artificial intelligence program, the dealership can begin to understand the nuances of their customers’ behavior patterns, and tailor makes what content is being communicated, as well as when or how it is released. This allows the dealer to capitalize and augment its engagement with the consumer base.
Bill explains, “I think it’s a great time for dealerships in the industry. They’ve been just flooded with a ton of data, and a lot of them don’t have time to read it or understand it, and I think AI and machine learning is going to take that data and be able to look at the past and make decisions on the present, and really come up with prescriptive analytics for the dealer.”
Bridget then poses the question, “Do you see a decline in the demand for human labor?” While Bill does see a decline across certain industries, he believes that human capital can be load balanced by artificial intelligence.
In fact, Dominion Dealer Solutions has its own program for combining AI and natural language bots to serve as a virtual assistant. Her name is OLIVIA, and she acts similarly to Cortana and Siri. And according to Bill, Dominion has several customers that come in expecting to meet with OLIVIA in person not realizing that she is a natural language bot. This seamless transition between AI and dealership experience is exactly what Bill is striving for in the industry today.
