🧩 Integration Is The Issue
Convenience vs. Trust, Perfecting the Customer Journey, and 15 Japans at Once
“Optimism is an essential ingredient of innovation. How else can the individual welcome change over security, adventure over staying in safe places?”
—Robert Noyce, Co-Founder of Intel
The AI Breakdown
Dealers Adapt to Market Disruptors
More than half of U.S. dealers say AI is already increasing sales and revenue. At the same time, auto buyers are growing more selective about where and how they encounter it.
That tension shows up clearly in the 2025 Urban Science Harris Poll Study, which found nearly 90% of dealers using or planning to use AI, while buyer confidence hinges heavily on transparency and relevance.
Urban Science
Dealers are seeing the strongest returns in practical areas like lead response, website chat, customer targeting, and inventory management.
51% of dealers report increased sales and revenue tied to AI, with speed and prioritization driving most of those results.
Urban Science
Dealers consistently point to privacy and integration challenges because both affect continuity. Customers feel friction when context disappears between systems or conversations restart from zero.
AI amplifies this. When systems are connected, AI feels helpful and informed. When they are not, it feels repetitive and mechanical.
This is especially important as dealers push harder into digital retail, post-purchase engagement, and long-term loyalty. AI cannot support those strategies if it only sees one slice of the customer.
Prompt of the Week
Most AI problems in dealerships don’t start as “AI problems.”
They start as handoff problems. Context problems. “Why does this feel disjointed?” problems.
This prompt is designed to help you use AI to audit your own AI stack through the lens that matters most: the customer experience.
Before running the prompt, paste in at least two of the following:
a recent website chat transcript
your first follow-up email or SMS
a short description of your lead routing rules
a CRM automation or timing rule
a service reminder message
notes on how sales, BDC, and service hand off customers
Act as a senior operations analyst and AI systems auditor.
Use the materials above as the source of truth.
Your objective is to identify where our AI-enabled workflow creates friction, loses context, or works against customer momentum.
Proceed in the following order:
1. Map the Journey
Outline the customer journey from first contact through sale or service. Identify which steps involve automation, which involve humans, and where decisions are made.
2. Simulate Reality
Generate at least 10 realistic customer scenarios based on the inputs, including:
a customer who switches channels mid-conversation
a customer who changes intent after initial contact
a customer with incomplete or conflicting information
a customer who experiences delayed human follow-up
Simulate each scenario step by step. Describe what the customer experiences at each stage.
3. Identify Failure Modes
For each scenario, flag:
where customer context is dropped or reset
where messages repeat, conflict, or feel generic
where automation pushes when it should pause
where AI outputs are treated as fact without validation
4. Score the Risk
Rank the issues you identified by:
likelihood of occurrence
impact on customer trust
ease of correction
5. Recommend Action
Deliver:
the top five experience risks most likely to be felt by customers
one workflow or integration change that would reduce friction fastest
one metric that reflects customer progress, not activity volume
one assumption in our current process that deserves scrutiny
Fresh Finds for Auto Pros
Management & Operations: Lindy
An AI executive assistant for automating internal ops tasks, communications, and scheduling. Great if you want a proficient, operations-centric teammate.
Finance & Insurance: Osfin
An AI-powered financial operations platform that automates high-volume tasks like reconciliation, invoice processing, payouts, and reporting, giving finance teams real-time visibility into cash flows while reducing manual work and errors.
Service and Parts: Auto-bot
An AI platform for automotive diagnostics that analyzes vehicle data with AI algorithms to identify issues and recommend tailored solutions in real time.
Hear from the Experts
At Merge 2025, global analyst Michael Dunne laid out a case that’s hard to ignore.
Chinese automakers have quietly scaled from exporting 1M to 8M vehicles in just five years. Most aren’t EVs. They’re affordable, fast to market, and packed with software.
Dunne compares it to “15 Japans at once” and argues that the U.S. needs a serious rethink on cost, R&D, and collaboration with allies if it wants to keep up.
Whether you agree or not, this is the conversation more leaders will be having in 2026.
Bits and Bytes
Waymo suspended its robotaxi service in San Francisco over the weekend after a massive blackout left many of its vehicles stalled on city streets. ⏸️
OpenAI released new personality settings for ChatGPT so users can adjust things like warmth, enthusiasm, and emoji use. đźŽ
Last week, New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed the RAISE Act into law, making NY the latest state to institute broad safety rules for AI. 🦺
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