We went looking for independent research on AI in automotive retail. The only genuinely independent work we found was Pied Piper’s mystery shopping, which reported AI handling dealership service calls successfully 91% of the time including scheduling.
Read the scope on that before you use it. It covers the service drive. Not sales, not acquisition. Different job, different conversation, different failure modes.
Everything else
Adoption rates, ROI figures, conversion lift. Trace them back and they land on vendors citing their own customers, or vendors citing each other citing their own customers. Kerrigan Advisors puts dealer AI deployment at 43% with another 47% planning, which is a credible firm and worth quoting, as long as you say Kerrigan rather than studies show.
Treat all of it as marketing. Ours included.
Why we are the ones saying it
Because we are one of the vendors, and we would rather tell a dealer where the evidence runs out than get caught at it in month two. Anybody can produce a number. Not everybody will tell you which of their numbers they would not defend.
When we have pilot results, they will be our results, measured on dealer inventory, and we will label them as exactly that. Until then the honest position is that the market data is solid and the vendor data, including ours, is not yet.