In the dealership world, operators spend enormous energy chasing, tracking, and responding to leads.
But even though that’s the reality, Conversica CEO Michael Gilson says most operators are still overlooking a fundamental problem: not being able to access their own store’s data.
Some background: Gilson took over leadership of Conversica, a conversational AI platform, last April, making automotive a core focus there.
And what he quickly realized was that, oftentimes, the dealership data is there, it’s just that dealers can’t reach it.
To his point, every store has a DMS, which Gilson calls the backbone, CRM, CDP systems, and years of engagement history buried in those emails, call logs, and then text messages within those systems.
The problem, though, is that those systems don’t talk to each other, and for dealer groups, the complexity is even greater because systems often vary from store to store.
"A lot of that data gets wasted," Gilson told Daily Dealer Live host Sam D’Arc. "And you can't really leverage it in a way that can really makes you more money.”
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Knowing this: He says dealers should be seeking systems that can (and should) deliver value almost immediately.
“You shouldn't need three, six, nine months to get value out of a system,” adding that once a dealer has the right foundation, a system should be “delivering value in minutes, not weeks, not months.”
On equity, for example, he said, “The beauty of it really, this intelligence layer, think of your best analyst or the world's best analysts, looking at your DMS trends, looking at your CRM data and being able to create models that can identify situations that have positive equity.”
His point: If modern AI can identify positive equity positions, flag service-to-sales opportunities, and surface high-value customer segments in real time, then marketing waste shrinks because campaigns are built on actual customer data, instead of guesses.
“The starting point for really any modern AI system is really the data and the data foundation,” Gilson said.
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