ARTIFICIAL intelligence can dramatically reduce dealership costs in generating leads and boost responses when merchandising a vehicle online, according to data and marketing specialist Digital Dealer.

The company, which works with many major dealerships in Australia and more than 100 OEMs and has partnerships with a growing list of finance groups, says it has become the first automotive provider to offer its artificial intelligence (AI) product to dealers and OEMs.

Digital Dealer CEO Andre Ferreira told GoAutoNews Premium that the advances in AI and its application to businesses such as automotive retail was as exciting to him – and had as much potential – as when the internet first started.

“Using AI to create leads allows the dealer to have an unfair advantage,” he said.

“The uptake of AI has been absolutely enormous. We believe that it’s going to go the same way as the internet, where it’s going to change our society and have a fundamental impact on our world. 

“What that looks like no one knows yet, but it will change our society. There’ll be jobs made and jobs lost.” 

Mr Ferreira said that the first publicly available part of its AI offering is the online comments that are generated using artificial intelligence.

“It has had an extremely high uptake within our clients. It is a very easy-to-use tool for our clients to understand and operate and has a great impact for their business.”  

Mr Ferreira said there were four fundamentals that a dealer must focus on in presenting a vehicle online in such a way that it can generate a lead.

“It’s the basics of online vehicle merchandising,” he said.

Andre Ferreira

“The four fundamentals that must be listed online when merchandising a vehicle are that it must have a price; it must have photos; the base information of the vehicle must be correct – so that the customer can properly identify the vehicle, and then the fourth element is comments. 

He said writing comments “can be a real pain point” because generally this is left to sales consultants and managers who are not copywriters. 

“In our research we have found that even the best dealers have at least 20 per cent of their online inventory with missing or inadequate comments.

“Many dealers just use the comment space to copy and paste things about their dealership, instead of helping the prospective car buyer by giving information about the vehicle.

“To us, that’s a lost opportunity and deteriorates the presentation of the vehicle by robbing the customer of a full insight of that particular vehicle.”

He said that on average, it takes a dealership at least 15 minutes to write a personalised comment on a vehicle. 

“For a dealership that has 100 vehicles in its yard, that’s 100 vehicles times 15 minutes – about 25 hours of focus time, not given breaks and things like that.

“That’s a considerable amount of time for a dealership busy retailing cars.”

Asked how much AI would cost to write a comment, Mr Ferreira said it was too early to state exactly but “we are confident that it’ll be much less than a cup of coffee.” 

The AI generator has been used by dealers in Digital Dealers’ client base for some months and the company is now calling for more dealers to trial it.

Mr Ferreira said the intention of the AI being used by Digital Dealer was to create a classified environment that structures the four pillars to ensure that the customers are engaged and stay on the page for longer.

“That way you allow those leads to come through more efficiently and you get a better quality of inquiry,” he said.

Mr Ferreira said dealers have become much better at taking photos. He said cars are no longer thrown into a dark corner and photographed – now they’re washed and cleaned, and they’re put in an ideal position with a nice business logo behind it. 

“Now, with just a smartphone, getting a good picture is quick and easy. So the only pillar missing for dealers to enhance and improve on has been the comments.”

He said that comments play a really integral role because it helps the customer to understand how different vehicles stack up in their consideration. 

“It’s a real opportunity to write a good quality comment. In our research we found that often comments have spelling and grammar issues and can have sentence construction that is pretty ordinary. 

“Some dealers do write very, very good comments as well, so I’m generalising to some degree.

“But probably the majority of dealers would probably say it’s a pain in the neck for our company.”

He said that Digital Dealer looked at the template form of constructing a comment section but found it was too bland and didn’t add much more value than any other summary.

“When we first used AI we could immediately see the advantages. I don’t think it takes away from copywriters, rather I think it just supports copywriters – or people who aren’t copywriters – to write even better copy.

“But it is also a huge time and money saver because it means staff don’t have to spend a lot of time writing the comments.”

Digital Dealer has also customised comments to talk in the tone of voice of an OEM’s brand. 

“It’s a really interesting enhancement that means OEMs and dealers can deliver comments in the language of the company, avoiding certain words and replacing them with the brand’s tone of voice,” he said.