Estimated read time 6-8 minutes. If you don’t have the time for the details here’s the TL; DR: DealerBuilt AI Labs introduces cutting-edge AI tools designed to streamline dealership operations, improve decision-making, and enhance customer engagement. With features like AI Insights and Summaries for quick data analysis, AI Co-Pilots for real-time recommendations, and AI In-Market Targeting for smarter customer prioritization, DealerBuilt focuses on practical AI solutions that empower employees rather than replace them. By embedding AI directly into workflows across Oplogic, Lightyear, and Vistadash, DealerBuilt ensures dealerships save time, work smarter, and achieve better results—all while keeping the human touch at the forefront.
By: Joe Keehnast, VP of Product, DealerBuilt
The Unofficial Theme of This Year’s NADA Show
NADA hasn’t even started yet, but I bet I can already tell you the unofficial theme of this year’s show in New Orleans: Artificial Intelligence. AI is the talk of the technology industry right now, and just about every software company is dabbling in it to some degree.
But here’s the real question: how many dealerships have actually found ways to put AI to work for their customers, staff, and bottom line?
The way we see it, there’s a lot of AI chatter and hype out there, but far fewer real success stories from inside dealerships than we expected. And we’ve been hard at work trying to fill that gap between expectations and actual results.
Recently, DealerBuilt’s leadership team launched a strategic initiative now known as DealerBuilt AI Labs. While we’ve had AI features built into our platform for quite some time with our AI Digital Assistant, AI Call Summary and AI Call Performance in Oplogic we wanted to start this initiative with a fresh perspective. Our goal wasn’t to ride the wave of AI buzz but to deeply consider what dealers should be doing with AI right now. We approached this with curiosity, customer input, and a commitment to solving meaningful problems.
Here’s what we’ve learned—and why we’re so excited to share it with you at NADA.
What We Learned
People Are Ready for a Co-Pilot, Not a Captain
AI is evolving quickly, and there’s a lot of talk about a future where it handles entire tasks end to end. But right now, AI’s sweet spot isn’t replacing people – it’s empowering them. The dealerships we spoke to are looking for tools that simplify, speed up, and sharpen their decision-making, instead of taking over entirely.
For example, dealership managers are asking questions like:
– How is my marketing spend performing?
– Am I spending money in the right places?
– How well have we communicated with this customer?
– How can I measure my back-end gross performance across cash, lease, and finance deals?
These are the kinds of questions that, until now, required tedious analysis, manual reporting, or outside data manipulation. AI can do much of the heavy lifting here, leaving employees to focus on applying their judgment where it matters most. The key lies in carefully connecting dealership data with AI. Exporting data into a general-purpose AI tool like ChatGPT isn’t practical—it raises privacy concerns and requires inefficient manual workflows. Instead, we’re embedding AI directly into DealerBuilt products, ensuring it delivers real value without disrupting dealership operations.
AI Has Gotten Good, But You Still Need Human Interaction
If you’ve used tools like ChatGPT or Gemini, you’ve likely been wowed by their ability to infer, analyze, and generate detailed responses. But as powerful as AI has become, it’s not perfect. It sometimes gets things wrong or doesn’t fully account for context. That’s why we believe AI’s role in dealerships is in completing the first leg of the work —helping employees work faster and smarter but typically leaving the final call to a human.
Take desking as an example. AI shouldn’t just serve up a deal to a customer —it should suggest options and help employees weigh their choices of what makes the most sense to present. The exciting part? AI can likely handle 80%+ of the grunt work of the more repetitive customer-facing tasks inside a dealership, leaving staff to sanity-check the results and close the loop. It’s all about leveraging AI to do the heavy lifting without losing the human touch.
Programming With AI, But Designing for Humans
Change is hard, especially when legacy dealership processes are deeply ingrained. The biggest hurdle isn’t just introducing better tools. It’s getting your people to adopt them. To succeed, AI-powered features must do the things dealerships already do—just way better, way simpler, and way faster.
The key here is designing tools that increase efficiency while minimizing disruption. It’s one thing to promise increased RO sales or better customer conversion rates. But if your service lane technicians won’t adopt the tool, that value is never realized. We’re committed to building AI tools that respect the realities of dealership workflows—balancing innovation with usability so the transition is as painless as possible.
DealerBuilt AI Labs – What We’re Building
AI Insights and Summaries
Throughout our product portfolio, we are implementing Insights and Summary features to streamline the information gathering + analysis process for employees. Here are a couple of examples:
– In Oplogic, we have a very rich history of communication and activity with each customer, but this comes with lots of data to read through, analyze, and interpret. Instead of trying to digest 10, 30, or 100 lines of history of customer and dealership communication, our AI Insights will deliver a succinct synopsis of your history with the customer and give you key talking points to discuss with them.
– In Vistadash, we’ve built an AI Monthly Summary that will analyze your marketing spend and results to give you feedback on how you have been performing, as well as recommendations on the top things you can do to improve your marketing. This will significantly reduce the time it takes to understand the data at your disposal and help you take action right away.
AI Co-Pilots
Also throughout the product portfolio, we are building “co-pilots” that will be available to answer questions and provide quick recommendations based on the data within the product. For example, both of the AI Insights features mentioned above will eventually include an attached co-pilot, enabling employees to prompt and ask follow-up questions. A manager might ask, “How well have we handled this customer interaction?” and instantly receive feedback based on the communication history with that customer. In Lightyear, our co-pilot is designed to provide faster access to information and data compared to navigating traditional reports and dashboards, saving you time (and allowing your staff to be more responsive to customers).
AI In-Market Targeting
Determining who to contact, how to engage them, and what to offer shouldn’t be left to chance. Our AI In-Market Targeting leverages dealership data, external data sources, and advanced algorithms to serve up prioritized customer lists, tailored messaging, and targeted offers that take the guesswork out of everyday work within your dealership, minimizing sloppy mistakes by staff and capitalizing on customer opportunities.
Where We’re Going Next
Get ready. You’re going to hear a lot of AI pitches at NADA. But since we’ve spent months researching, building, and reflecting on it – here’s ours:
AI should save you time, not pile more onto your plate. It should make your team’s job easier, not harder. And it shouldn’t be just another shiny object in your tech stack – it should help your dealership sell cars, fix cars, and move your business forward.
The way we see it, AI should feel like a search bar in your browser: always there, always helpful, and never in the way. That’s why we’re focused not just on what work AI can do, but on how it fits into the features and workflows that already work for you inside your DealerBuilt system. It’s about respecting the habits and patterns that make your dealership run while enhancing them with the power of AI.
In the months ahead, we’ll be embedding AI deeper into the workflows you already rely on, simplifying everyday tasks and making them faster and smarter. You can expect tools that cut through the tedious work and surface the insights you need instantly, freeing your team to focus on the work that drives results—not the software that supports it.
Stop by our booth at NADA to see what we’re building and let’s talk about how AI can actually make a difference for your dealership.