AI is a top-three contender for the most repetitive buzzword in the industry right now, and that’s true across job roles, whether you’re a dealer, lender, or vendor.
It’s everywhere. And as reporters, that creates an added responsibility for our team to cut through what might be a one-time situation vs. what’s an unfolding trend, so that the real impact for our readers (who are primarily dealers) is crystal clear.
That brings us to Podium Connect 2026.
Driving the news: Last month, Podium hosted its Podium Connect 2026 conference in Park City, Utah.
During the event, attendees heard from Emmitt Smith, Pro Football Hall of Fame running back and Entrepreneur.
They also heard from Jeannie Andrews, GTM Leadership with OpenAI.
Following the event, we wanted to know what actually stuck with operators once they were back at the store. And what they think feels true of AI right now.
Takeaway one: Automotive jobs are not at risk of being replaced by AI. At least not at the scale the industry might have believed a few years ago.
That take was emphasized across our conversations with Brian Ortega of Valley-Hi Toyota, Tina Tasche of Van Horn Automotive Group, and Ashley Cavazos, president of the Women of Color Automotive Network (WOCAN).
"It's really important that those two pieces work together," said Tasche, of AI and staff. "If they don't, you're gonna have a gap between the AI and the handoff to the interim experience."
Tina Tasche
At Van Horn, she said that belief has actually added headcount at the dealer group, not cut it.
Case in point: "We've got several new positions within the BDC as a result of AI taking on some of the front load of inbound leads and calls," Tasche said.
Cavazos, who is now operating in the consulting space after 16 years in auto retail, told us the same.
"To this day, we still need our people 100%. I just want my people to be able to focus on giving quality customer service and not be stuck with mundane tasks."
Takeaway two: Customers are already using AI in their personal lives and, in many cases, expect businesses to be as familiar with the technology as they are.
“We get so nervous about what our customers are going to think [about using AI]... but they're already doing it in all the rest of their lives,” Cavazos said.
Ashley Cavazos
She, for context, has worked with AI in automotive retail since 2012, and was an early pilot store for ChatGPT-powered sales responses through DriveCentric back in 2022 and 2023.
She said her team was skeptical at first, but that after watching the AI follow up with every customer the same way, it “actually became a trainer for a sales team.”
Backing this up: Ortega, with Valley-Hi, is using AI on the marketing side to create banner ads and content for the dealership's in-store monitors.
In one example, he made "an avatar of him, like a Pixar character," using his used car manager's voice, "walking around talking about used cars on the lot."
That's a use case specific to his role.
Even so, Ortega sees the bigger risk sitting on the sales floor, not in the marketing department.
He said dealers who treat AI as someone else's job are the ones who'll get caught off guard by a customer who's shown up "knowing more than the salesperson."
Takeaway three: Find a use case that makes sense for your store, and don’t overwhelm your team by pushing too many at once.
At Van Horn, they recently narrowed in on voice AI specifically to handle overflow calls their team didn't have the staff to handle.
According to Tasche, the team rolled it out over 60 days across three of Van Horn's larger service departments, which were chosen because they needed extra coverage.
"We take a crawl, walk, run approach at Van Horn," she said, adding that on one Monday alone, the system handled 113 overflow calls and booked 58 service appointments autonomously.
"Don't try to do a voice AI and SMS AI and all these different pieces at the same time in tandem, because it takes time, patience, [and] effort."
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At Valley-Hi: Ortega took a similarly narrow approach, testing a beta feature that lets a BDC rep ask the assistant which leads need follow-up that day, rather than handing the whole department to AI at once.
“It'll list it out. ‘Here's Mary, here's Susie, here's Larry. Would you like me to follow up…’"
Brian Ortega
In one case, he said he called the BDC rep to check on the list it had given them, and they responded, “Oh, they bought.”
WOCAN’s Cavazos, referencing the same feature demoed at the event, told us she immediately saw a use for it in her own commute.
Rather than waiting until she's logged into a CRM at the office, she said, "why not make that drive useful and start getting game set for my day?"
Takeaway four: Work with vendors who make implementation easier, not harder.
Cavazos specifically has seen enough vendors come and go to know that the sale is the easy part. The harder part, and the one she said gets overlooked, is what happens after a dealership signs on.
"They're wanting to put AI in their stores, they're wanting to implement this technology, and they get it in there," she said, "but then their team doesn't know what to do with it once it's there."
As she put it, "The greatest tool can be the greatest tool, but it's not that great if you don't have the right support with it.”
Bottom line: As current Podium customers, these operators aren't neutral observers, and that's worth naming outright.
But what they left Podium Connect 2026 with, more than loyalty to any single vendor, was their read on AI right now, aka headcount over cuts, customer expectations over hesitation, and careful rollouts over rushed ones.
A quick word from our partner
AI is everywhere right now — but not all AI is created equal.
Many dealerships are running bolt-on tools that answer questions, but don’t convert or drive measurable revenue.
Podium delivers AI built to perform, consolidating sales, service, and voice into one platform that manages conversations end-to-end and books more appointments.
If you’re investing in AI, make sure it’s driving results.
