AI voice and text bots are becoming increasingly ubiquitous. Perhaps surprisingly, many dealers are going all-in on the technology, according to Monik Pamecha, CEO and Founder of AI dealership platform Toma.
Driving the news: In an episode of Daily Dealer Live on Wednesday, Pamecha told hosts Sam D’Arc and Uli de’ Martino that his team was initially surprised by the level of dealer enthusiasm when deploying its automated text and voice AI tools. Instead of starting with small pilots, he said many are launching the tools across their entire retail networks.
“...It’'s been a little surprising because I initially thought, like when we were even building the product and talking to our customers, that they probably want to pilot it and they want to slowly roll it out,” Pamecha said. “But there seems to be a trend in place where dealers are going for it. They want to get [it into] all their stores at once.”
Between the lines: Although Pamecha said the discovery was unexpected, he believes it coincides with a larger cultural shift in how customers are interacting with AI systems across industries.
“It seems like there's this growing confidence in the technology itself,” he added. “And I think maybe it's because there's a cultural shift, right? If you call the pharmacy, or you call the hospital, you're getting AI agents everywhere, so there's this growing level of comfort with the consumers by default.”
Why it matters: As AI tools are being deployed all over, some dealers and customers remain skeptical about them. However, they’re quickly starting to sound more natural, and consumers are simultaneously growing more comfortable with utilizing them.
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Pamecha also said that some dealership employees are actually embracing these tools, even digging deeper into them and creating new use cases—and potentially even setting the stage for new AI-focused roles in the business.
“So, I'm sure there are people who don't want to touch it and change it,” Pamecha said. “But then there are these employees who are like, ‘What did your support like… when I requested this change, they did something. Can you give me access to make that change myself?’”
”And they are like building these new use cases that we didn't think were possible because they have the knowledge of the workflow,” he explained.
Bottom line: Dealerships don’t want to get left behind amidst the larger AI rollout, and many of these tools stand to benefit both customers and employees, especially in cases such as scheduling, service system integration, and ultimately, conversion rates.
“So I think there's these overall model improvements that are just helping increase conversion rates, for example, right? Because stuff that was 50% maybe six months ago, is now at 65%, 70%, 80%, depending on the use case,” he added.
