🔥 Top Story
Paul Sansone Jr., owner of Sansone Jr.'s Auto Group, told CBT News his focus these days isn't adding rooftops — it's building the tech and team to make his existing stores smarter. His service department now uses an AI-powered BDC that answers every incoming call without wait times, converting nearly 65% of those calls into scheduled appointments.
Source: https://www.cbtnews.com/inside-sansone-jr-s-auto-group
📰 Other Notable Stories
Phone friction still plaguing dealers even as AI adoption climbs — CBT News' August newscasts flagged that CDK finds phone friction persists at dealerships as AI adoption grows, a reminder that buying the tool isn't the same as fixing the problem. Source: https://www.cbtnews.com/cbt-automotive-newscast-august-03-2026
DealerOn's double AI launch hits websites and search visibility — DealerOn rolled out both Sidekick (merchandising, chat, and analytics AI) and OnPrompt, a tool built because OnPrompt is designed to help dealers monitor AI visibility, evaluate brand sentiment, identify content gaps and uncover opportunities to improve how their business shows up in AI searches. Source: https://www.autoremarketing.com/ar/technology/dealerons-dual-launch-includes-ai-search-visibility-platform-intelligent-layer-touching-full-dealership/
Cox Automotive: AI decides who even gets mentioned now — Cox's retail team is warning dealers that large language models increasingly determine which businesses get mentioned at all, as consumers increasingly use generative AI tools to research and purchase everyday products, and that behavior is expanding, not contracting. Source: https://www.coxautoinc.com/retail/resources/ai-for-car-dealerships-discovery-data/
Shoppers are building their own AI agents to skip the showroom entirely — Automotive News profiled buyers who built custom AI agents to find and buy vehicles using Reddit, Visor.vin and ChatGPT, including a Massachusetts software developer who used an open-source AI agent to negotiate his Hyundai Palisade purchase — bypassing traditional listing sites and dealerships. Source: https://www.autonews.com/retail/an-ai-produces-new-kind-of-car-customer-0319/
Dealers say they're not slowing AI spend despite the noise — A Spyne-commissioned study found about 76% of dealers plan to increase spending on AI products, driven by margin compression, rising labor costs, average transaction prices hovering around $50,000 for new cars and $30,000 for 3-year-old used cars, together with customers expecting immediate responses. Source: https://news.dealershipguy.com/p/full-ai-integration-becoming-urgent-for-dealers-study-says-2026-02-19
💡 Tool Spotlight
LotGPT (from Lotlinx) — it's the only chatbot built exclusively for car dealers, and it knows your market, dealership and inventory. Fueled by Lotlinx's decades of VIN and Shopper data, plus your live inventory, Google Analytics and CRM, it delivers relevant answers and guidance to help you sell cars faster and more profitably. Price: LotGPT is free for dealers, but invite-only. Who it's for: GMs and inventory managers who want a plain-English "ask your data anything" tool without another line item on the software budget — assuming you can get the invite.
📊 Stat of the Day
Nearly 40% of dealers are utilizing AI in some way at their stores, with 77% of them already integrating AI tools into their systems, according to CDK's "AI at the Dealership" study. (Note: this figure comes via CBT News' reporting on the CDK study, not a direct primary-source link we could verify — treat as secondhand.) Source: https://www.cbtnews.com/cdk-report-ai-in-dealership
🔮 Trend Watch
The center of gravity is shifting from customer-facing chatbots to internal ops and discovery infrastructure — AI and large language models are reshaping dealer discovery, shifting influence from clicks to mentions and making inventory data a key factor in whether a dealership surfaces at all, with data quality and system connectivity determining AI impact. At the same time, a new front is opening in "AI visibility" tooling (DealerOn's OnPrompt, Cars Commerce's GEO/AEO push) as dealers realize ranking in ChatGPT and Gemini answers matters as much as ranking on Google. And the most unsettling thread: buyers are starting to bring their own AI agents to the negotiating table, which means the "trust the salesperson" pitch dealers have leaned on for decades is about to get tested by bots that don't care about rapport — just price data.
Free dealer AI tools
Start with the foundation: install Dealer AI Skills, then run Dealer Website Grader to find technical website leaks and DealerAEOAudit to see whether AI assistants recommend your dealership.
- Browse Dealer AI Skills, the first open-source AI skills marketplace for dealers →
- Grade your dealer website →
- Check your AI visibility →
Reading about AI won't train your team
The stores pulling ahead aren't the ones with the most tools — they're the ones whose people know how to use them. That takes a strategy, a readiness baseline, and real training.
- AI Training Days — leadership, Sales & BDC, and Service sessions, in your store, on your numbers
- Dealer AI Readiness Checklist — score where your store actually stands before you spend another dollar
- AI strategy & implementation help — pick the first workflow, write the SOP, measure it