A short course covering the vocabulary, risks and controls you need before your first pilot.
Key takeaways
Before evaluating any vendor, it helps to separate a tool that answers and books a straightforward enquiry from one that makes a judgment call, like approving credit or diagnosing a repair. Almost everything worth deploying at a dealership or shop falls into the first category.
This lesson gives dealer principals and service managers a shared, plain-language vocabulary so vendor conversations don't get lost in marketing terms like 'AI-powered' or 'autonomous', which mean very different things depending on who's selling them.
The risk isn't that an AI assistant occasionally misunderstands a customer; every front counter does that too. It's the absence of a clear handoff to a person when the conversation needs judgment, a quote, or a genuine apology.
This lesson walks through the common failure points, an unclear escalation path, a script that doesn't match how your team actually talks to customers, so you know what to ask a vendor before signing anything.
Customer names, phone numbers and vehicle details all count as personal information under Canadian privacy law. You need to know where that data goes once it enters a tool, how long it's kept, and whether your DMS or CRM data is used for anything beyond your own dealership.
This lesson gives a short checklist to bring into any vendor negotiation, so data handling is settled before a pilot starts, not renegotiated after a concern comes up.
The final lessons cover how to design a review step for anything customer-facing, who approves a script change, how outbound messages get logged, and how to scope a first pilot narrow enough to judge fairly within a month or two.
By the end, you'll have a one-page framework you can apply to any AI pitch that lands on your desk, whether it's for the front counter, the service drive or the parts window.
A 30-minute call is enough to tell you whether AI pays for itself here.
