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Impel partners with Ford to bring enhanced AI to dealers nationwide
The alliance suggests more vendor-manufacturer collaborations are on the way. (3 min. read)
Artificial intelligence-powered platform Impel is partnering with Ford to boost performance at dealerships across the U.S.
Driving the news: Impel and Ford announced the partnership in a press release, highlighting the difficulties dealers have faced in implementing AI solutions.
Data is key to offering quality care for customers, anticipating needs, and boosting retention.
However, while retailers have long had the ability to collect information leveraging it effectively has proven to be more difficult.
Impel and Ford’s new alliance seeks to fix this by connecting the former’s conversational AI to the latter’s Customer Journey Platform (CJP), part of a software suite offered by FordDirect.
This integration will allow AI technology to leverage data within the CJP to tailor messages to the customer, with the goal of making them more effective at handling user requests while boosting various metrics for the dealership.
Zooming in: The feature will be available to both Ford and Lincoln dealers, with a demo set for this week’s NADA show in New Orleans. According to the release, pilot runs of the new integration drove improved performance at participating dealerships.
Looking ahead: While the auto industry is increasingly implementing AI into its operations, only 32% of dealers in a recent CDK Global study have used the technology for variable ops.
However, partnerships between automakers and AI vendors signal that this percentage is likely to grow much higher in the coming months. Should Impel and Ford’s alliance boost results, other manufacturers are certain to follow suit.
So far, dealers are using AI in a variety of ways, although on the variable ops side, it has been the most effective at generating and closing leads, according to CDK. For fixed ops, retailers have reported higher appointment rates by using chatbots to schedule appointments off hours.
And yet, whatever the results so far, AI firms have much bigger ambitions.
Speaking on the CDG podcast last September, Devin Daly, co-founder and CEO of Impel, said the company’s goal “is to really use A.I. to manage all customer communications throughout the life cycle.”
Daly went on to highlight the retail automotive sector’s massive reliance on human capital, pointing out that dealerships often employ 150 team members for each storefront.
It remains unclear what effect the growth of AI will have on the automotive workforce.
Proponents of the technology argue it won’t replace humans but will instead enhance employee productivity, allowing them to pursue more important targets while leaving tedious tasks to machines.
But whether AI replaces or enhances will largely depend on the goals of the users, in this case, dealers, and how they choose to incorporate these systems into their operations.
For many, it seems like that has yet to be decided—although automaker-vendor partnerships could hasten that choice.
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