BLOG: More upsides than down with AI for auto retail

With the recent news that BT will become a ‘leaner business’ and push into artificial intelligence (AI), there’s amped up anxiety that this rapidly growing technology could take work away from humans. But where AI might replace jobs at some point, we believe this technology will not only lead to more creativity but also create more new jobs and opportunities for business growth.

We know the automotive retail market is more competitive now than ever before. Margins are tighter and profit or loss often hinges on how quickly stock is rotated and then sold. In this environment, anything that gives your business a competitive edge and increases efficiency should be welcomed.

There are so many ways in which ChatGPT and AI can be a benefit to automotive retail. You have email marketing, and we use it today to craft personalised emails, speeding up efficiency and even conversion rates. Some car dealers blast out emails as finance deals come to an end, but they are very generic. With ChatGPT you can speed up everything, but more tailored and engaging.

At Phyron we have developed our own Large Language Model similar to GPT-4 AI software, but fine-tuned to automotive sales, this is combined with our proprietary AI systems to create generative AI content 100% automatically, bespoke to individual customers, for hundreds of thousands of automotive classified ads every day.

We are now starting to add life-like voiceovers to videos. We train the AI software to learn how a specific automotive brand sells their cars and what language and tonality they use. But now we can use the ChatGPT style Large Language Model to write the transcripts. That extra input raises the bar on efficiency and quality.

From a customer perspective, ChatGPT and AI-chatbots can assist them in finding the right vehicle that fits their needs and preferences, from initial interaction to purchase completion and post-sales service, including troubleshooting, service and maintenance among many other things. There’ll come a point where ChatGPT can get very close to how a salesperson sells a car offline.

Yet, an important consideration for using ChatGPT is knowing how to ‘prompt’ effectively. You need to be very specific, providing detail on exactly what you want. The more detail you give, the better, and be prepared to work with it a bit to get the content you want. We absolutely see a need for new jobs working with ChatGPT – specifically ‘prompt engineers’.

We believe that AI and ChatGPT will play an increasingly pivotal role in the process of car selling and buying. Our goal now is to help dealers satisfy the growing demand for quality video content in a time- and cost-efficient way, bridging the gap between businesses who advertise and their customers, who are video first.

By Phyron CEO Johan Sundstrand