Fox Motors is leaning heavily into generative AI to improve various facets of its operations.
It's all part of what Yuriy Demidko, the group’s senior VP and chief information officer, describes as "finding new ways to do old things, as well as finding new things to do with new ways."
Driving the news: The strategy started with a fundamental shift in customer engagement. Fox Motors dismantled its traditional BDC and redistributed staff to high-volume stores, using AI as the initial touchpoint for the 37% of leads that come in after hours.
"Leveraging AI to start engaging with those leads really meets the customer where they're at—home from work, they're sitting, they just had dinner and decided to look at a vehicle," Demidko told Daily Dealer Live hosts Sam D'Arc and Yossi Levi. "That one has been extremely successful."
The details: Fox Motors leverages AI to handle basic customer inquiries (questions about sunroofs, child locks, or vehicle features) before escalating to human staff when buying signals emerge. The repositioned BDC employees then determine whether leads should go directly to sales or require additional nurturing.
But between the lines: This success opened the door for Demidko’s most ambitious project—building a custom sentiment analysis system.
"Our CEO actually brought it up, like he wanted to know, like, can we do something like this? And I'm like, you know what, I don't know. So then later that evening, I was sitting there, I'm like, well, let me try,” Demidko explained.
He built a tool that ingests reviews from all channels into a database, then applies AI to analyze patterns and sentiment across the entire dealer group. This homegrown system now provides consulting-level insights about customer perceptions without the traditional expense.
For example, When the system identifies trends like warranty coverage confusion, Fox Motors can address the issue and re-engage the customer at the same time.
In addition to generative AI, other forms of the tech are great tools for pricing inventory, enhancing videos and photos, improving merchandizing, and establishing image and brand consistency across platforms, explained Demidko.
The key, he said, is to stay ahead of the game.
“Instead of looking at the month, what I'm doing is I'm looking at, literally…how is technology going to take us one year, two years, five years, 10 years—and try to, kind of, pivot the business in that direction,” he added.
Bottom line: Fox Motors is treating AI as a business strategy tool rather than a replacement for human judgment—an approach that's generating measurable results across multiple departments.
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