The car buying process consumers grew up with looks less permanent by the year, as more buyers push dealers toward speed, digital tools and less friction in the sales process. Joining us on today’s edition of CBT Live is Ryan Rohrman, CEO of Rohrman Automotive Group. He discusses the group’s new Gurnee Hyundai store, its partnership with Amazon Autos, and how customer data and AI are reshaping the dealership experience.
That shift starts with meeting customers wherever they’ve already gotten in the process instead of running everyone through the same steps. Rohrman pointed to Amazon Autos, where the group now sells vehicles directly on the platform, as proof that a growing share of buyers want to skip the traditional sales process altogether. One of the last questions Amazon asks those customers is whether they want a walkthrough of the vehicle or just the keys, and a lot of them are choosing the keys.
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Behind the scenes, the group has spent the past few years cleaning up its own customer data through a customer data platform (CDP) built on a cloud data platform that consolidates information from the group’s DMS, website and marketing systems into one place for analysis. Rohrman said that investment came after finding roughly half of the group’s marketing data was inaccurate, a problem he traced to the write-back limitations of dealer management systems.
Rohrman said the group is now building AI agents to handle repetitive tasks that marketers previously handled manually and inconsistently, freeing staff for work that still requires a human. He’s applying the same conquest mindset to fixed ops, pointing to a $50 oil change promotion launched in March that has driven a 17% increase in customer pay repair order (CPRO) growth across the group’s 20 rooftops.
Rohrman says dealers who treat AI as just another prompting tool are already behind, since the technology is moving from answering questions to autonomously shopping and negotiating on a buyer’s behalf. Meanwhile, dealer groups that build their business models around that shift will pull ahead of those still betting the car business will operate the way it always has.
