Mike Yates, general manager at BMW of Bridgewater in Bridgewater, N.J., is building his own AI tools in-house across service, inventory management, and search visibility, a move he says other operators should consider exploring.
"A lot of people played with AI maybe a year ago, maybe two years ago, and it wasn't great back then," Yates told Daily Dealer Live host Sam D'Arc. "But it's gotten so good and so powerful that I encourage everybody to get back involved if they're not already."
Where it started: A staffing shortage in the service BDC left one person answering all incoming calls, so Yates built a voice agent himself to cover the gap.
He eventually replaced it with Numa, a third-party vendor, drawn in by the visibility the dashboard gave him into which calls were handled, which weren't, and whether customers were getting called back.
The Numa decision was a vendor call, not a build, but he says the decision to build first opened the door to everything that came next.
"It was a good exercise," he said. "And then that kind of started the whole process of, you know, we can build some of these tools in-house."
What he actually built: From there, Yates moved into tools he created himself, starting with one designed to track how his dealership shows up in AI-generated search results.
This was a move he said followed his observation that the store ranked differently across ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok depending on how a query was worded.
In response, he built a tool he calls AEO Whisper to run dozens of queries daily across all three and map visibility versus competitors.
The finding: Gemini leans on Google ratings and review volume. Grok pulls from DealerRater. Reddit surfaces consistently across several of them.
"I think, as dealers, [we] need to know, are we visible? And if we're not, how do we become visible?" Yates said.
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In another example: Yates said technicians and advisors were regularly pulling the warranty admin away from her work to ask coverage questions, so he fed the 187-page BMW warranty policy manual into a custom GPT, named it after her, and shared the link with the entire dealership.
He said anyone with a free ChatGPT login can access it. No paid account required. Other dealers he knows have since adopted it as well.
"Everyone in the dealership was given access to Ally 2.0, and it gets used pretty often. It was a great tool, and it was not difficult to make."
On inventory: Yates said the most complex build runs in N8N, a workflow automation platform, and uses multiple AI agents to manage loaner car disposition and used vehicle inventory recommendations.
With this, he says it pulls the vAuto FTP feed and factors in seasonality, demand cycles, market day supply, and current sell-through before recommending when to pull a loaner into used car rotation.
"It's not looking at a hard 30-day turn, a hard 60, hard 90," Yates said. "It's really looking at when it makes sense."
On data: Yates keeps customer data and non-public personal information out of every tool entirely, not because of doubts about platform security, but because he's not comfortable with it regardless.
Beyond these points: When asked where a dealer starting from zero should begin, Yates had a simple answer.
"Step one today is to go on Claude. Just start there. Just start asking some questions," he said. "We're at the point now where you're either going to consume AI, or you're going to create AI—and somewhere in between there, you should at least understand what's going on."
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