We visited the Car Dealer Live 2026 conference in Gaydon, the UK in March 2026 to get an insight of the talking points of the car dealership market in the UK. There were a range of topics covered from the sourcing challenges of used cars, the influx of the new Chinese brands and models introduced to the market to the questions how to adopt AI in the car retail industry.
Among the sessions polls were conducted among the participants. One of them being where do you think businesses are losing most revenue due to disconnected systems and processes. The winner was Lead generation and follow up with 38 % believing this is where fallback most takes place. You can read it the other way round too, this is where dealerships have most to win if they can improve their systems and processes and do not lose their leads.
This leads to a question why this happens? We spend a lot of time, effort and often money to get more leads for our dealerships, but yet we still seem to loose them in the process. Some studies say that 40 % of them the leads are lost in the process.
One of the reason could be that over 30% of the leads are engaging with our outside the business hours. They do their research, compare and find information to find what they need and majority of the time, 67% by one study, expect a reply within 6 hours or same day.
Our expectations of speedy replies have increased. Simultaneously, it is also true that fewer people are visiting the shops – within younger generations the average dealerships visits are coming down from 5 to 1.2 visits when purchasing a car.
This is where AI may give a helping hand to expand our service hours and provide customer service outside the retail hours. 44% of the attendance believed that AI can assist in the customer experience when used well.
We at Fiare believe that introducing AI assistants, such as our AI AutoAgent, will help the dealerships to improve their customer service, be able to respond to their questions whether it is related to the cars currently on sale, or to find a vehicle that suits their needs, lifestyle and family situation and also give information from the trusted sources.
The AI AutoAgent will also provide paths for the buyer to contact the sales representative, book a test drive or request a pre-qualification for the finance. Once the sales representatives get the leads they will be have a better picture of the needs of the buyer and be able to close the sale.
We have still a lot to learn how AI is able to help and smoothen the car buying journey, but the time to learn and adopt new ways is now. The forerunners will be better equipped to respond to the changing requirements of the customer expectations.
