You Bought the Tool. You Skipped the Point.
Automotive retail has a technology addiction and a people problem. And everyone’s too busy demoing the next solution to notice.
If AI adoption had seven stages of grief, automotive retail would be stuck somewhere between denial and bargaining, convinced that the next platform purchase is the move that finally changes everything.
It won’t be.
I’ve spent years watching this industry navigate technological transformation, and I can tell you with some confidence: the pattern doesn’t change. The tools get smarter. The people don’t. And the gap between what a dealership has and what it can actually do keeps getting wider.
The Tool Trap Is Real, and You’re In It
Walk into almost any dealership group today, and you’ll find a technology stack that would have seemed like science fiction a decade ago. AI-powered lead scoring. Automated follow-up sequences. Predictive inventory tools. Conversational AI for service scheduling. A CRM that, if anyone actually used it correctly, would be genuinely transformative.
And yet.
The BDC rep is still manually copying and pasting leads into a spreadsheet. The service advisor is still writing repair orders the same way they did in 2011. The sales manager is still running a TO the same way their manager ran one on them. The GM is still pulling the same three reports, making the same gut calls, and wondering why the AI-generated insights never quite match reality.
You bought the tool. You skipped the point.
This Pattern Has a Name
It’s not new. Dealerships did it with CRM. They did it with digital retailing. They did it with video walk-arounds, digital inspection platforms, and online F&I tools. Every five to seven years, a new category of technology arrives promising to transform the business. Vendors descend. Twenty-group conversations ignite. The trade press covers it breathlessly. Dealer Principals sign contracts.
And then the tool sits, half-configured, under-utilized, and eventually blamed for underperforming, while the people who were supposed to use it never really changed how they worked.
The technology wasn’t the problem then. It isn’t now.
The problem is that buying a tool feels like progress. Training people is slow, unglamorous, and hard to put on a slide for the dealer group board meeting. So we keep choosing the former and wondering why we’re not getting the results of the latter.
What Vendors Won’t Tell You (But Should)
The vendor community shares ownership of this problem, and it’s time to say that out loud.
Too many automotive technology companies have built their entire go-to-market strategy around selling, not outcomes. Onboarding is rushed. Training is a webinar and a help center. Success is measured in contract renewals, not in whether the tool actually changed behavior on the floor. When the product underperforms, the answer is almost always a new feature, an upsell, or a re-demo, not a hard conversation about adoption.
There are exceptions. They’re not the majority.
If you are selling technology into dealerships and you cannot point to specific, measurable behavior change in the people using your product, you are part of the problem. You are accelerating the tool trap and calling it innovation.
OEMs, You’re Not Off the Hook Either
Manufacturers have spent billions pushing technology requirements down to the dealer network. Certified digital retailing tools. Required CRM integrations. Mandated lead response platforms. And in many cases, the training and change management support provided to dealers to actually use these tools has been somewhere between thin and nonexistent.
Compliance gets measured. Competency does not.
So dealers check the box, activate the tool, meet the requirement, and the tool joins the pile of other things that are technically running and functionally ignored. Meanwhile, OEM field teams are evaluating dealers on whether the software is installed, not whether anyone knows how to use it.
Requirements without enablement aren’t standards. They’re theater.
The Stores That Are Actually Winning
There are dealers getting this right. Not many, but enough to learn from.
They share a few things in common that have nothing to do with which tools they’ve purchased.
They treat upskilling as a permanent operating cost, not a one-time event. They budget for it the way they budget for advertising, because they understand that a team that can’t use the tools they have is just as expensive as not having the tools at all.
Their GMs and Dealer Principals are genuinely curious. They’re not delegating AI and technology to the “digital person.” They’re asking questions, getting into the platforms, understanding what their people see every day, and holding themselves to the same standard of learning they’re asking of the team.
They hire and develop for adaptability, not just domain expertise. The best BDC manager they have isn’t the one who’s been running BDCs the longest. It’s the one who figured out how to use the AI tools to make their team twice as effective in half the time.
And when a tool isn’t being used, they don’t blame the tool first. They ask why. They fix the behavior, the process, or the accountability gap, and then decide whether the tool is the right fit.
A Blunt Diagnosis
Here’s what’s actually happening across the majority of dealer groups right now:
The average dealership employee has access to more AI-powered capabilities than they know what to do with. They haven’t been trained on it meaningfully. They haven’t been given time to explore it. They’ve been shown a demo, handed a login, and told it’ll help them hit their numbers, and then left alone to figure out what that means while still being held to the same daily activity expectations as before.
That’s not transformation. That’s abandonment with better software.
At the leadership level, enormous energy is spent evaluating, negotiating, and implementing new tools, and only a fraction of that energy is devoted to the harder, slower, more important work of changing how people think, learn, and operate.
The stores that figure this out will have a compounding advantage. Not because they found the right tool. Because they built a team that knows how to use whatever tool comes next.
What To Do About It
If you’re a Dealer Principal or Group Executive:
Stop buying tools you can’t train people on. If you cannot credibly commit to a 90-day adoption plan with accountability built in, don’t sign the contract. A shelfware AI tool is not a competitive advantage. It’s a line item.
Make upskilling non-optional and ongoing. Not a lunch-and-learn. Not an annual offsite. A permanent, structured investment in your people’s ability to work with the technology you’ve already bought, and whatever comes next.
Audit utilization before you evaluate replacements. Before you add the next tool, find out what percentage of your current stack is actually being used at its designed level. The answer will be uncomfortable. It will also tell you exactly where to focus.
Hold vendors accountable for outcomes, not just uptime. Your contracts should include adoption metrics, not just SLAs. If your vendor can’t tell you how their tool changed behavior on your floor, renegotiate or walk.
If you’re a vendor:
Build for behavior change, not just feature adoption. The question isn’t whether dealers can use your product. It’s whether they do, and whether it’s changing how they work. Design your onboarding, your CS, and your success metrics around that.
If you’re an OEM:
Pair every technology mandate with a meaningful enablement program. Requirements without training aren’t standards. They’re unfunded mandates that create compliance theater and breed dealer cynicism about every initiative that follows.
The Hopeful Part
Here’s what’s true: the opportunity in automotive retail right now is enormous. The tools available today, when used by a team that knows how to use them, can fundamentally change what’s possible in sales productivity, service retention, customer experience, and operating efficiency. The dealers who close the gap between what they have and what they can do will build advantages that are genuinely hard to replicate.
But that gap doesn’t close with another purchase order.
It closes with leadership that’s willing to do the slow, hard, unglamorous work of building a team that learns.
The tool is not the answer.
The people who are trained, supported, and held accountable are the answer.
They always have been.