Toddlearsmith

Driving the next era of automotive intelligence. Not talk. Execution. Founder, QoreAI | Husband | Father | Surfer

[Toddlearsmith @Toddlearsmith]

I've spoken with more than 200 dealer groups this year. The most common thing I hear isn't excitement about AI.

It's hesitation.

"We're not ready."
"We tried a tool and it didn't deliver."
"We don't know who to trust."

All fair.

Here's what I tell every one of them. You don't have to decide on AI today. You do have to get your data ready.

When AI disappoints a dealer, it's rarely the model. It's the data underneath it. Duplicate customers. Missing service history. A DMS and a CRM that disagree on who bought what.

Put AI on top of messy data and you get confident wrong answers.

I've been saying this for over a year. So we made it its own product.

QoreVault does one job. It pulls your data out of your DMS, CRM and inventory systems, cleans every record and keeps it current. No AI layer. Nothing new for your people to learn.

Think of it as getting the books in order before you hire the CFO.

When you're ready for AI, the hardest part is already done.

If you're on the fence about AI, start here.

What's holding your dealership back on AI right now: the data, trust, or time?

[Toddlearsmith @Toddlearsmith]

Your AI phone agent thinks that call went great.

Every dealership AI phone agent demos the same way. Natural voice. Books the appointment. Works at 9pm on a Sunday.

Then it goes live, and 90 days later the store quietly turns it off.

Two reasons. Neither one is the voice.

1. The agent does not know your store.

It is answering from a script and a website scrape. It does not know the RO history, the open recall, the part that has been on backorder for eleven days, or that this caller has bought four vehicles from you. A phone agent without the store's data is a receptionist with amnesia. The customer figures that out in about fifteen seconds.

2. The agent does not hear your customer.

Almost nobody in our industry is talking about this one. The standard stack turns audio into text, then hands the text to a model. Tone, pace, emphasis, hesitation, sarcasm, anger. All of it thrown away before the model ever sees the call.

So the customer says "Oh, perfect." Furious. Dripping with sarcasm. The transcript reads as satisfaction. The call gets logged as resolved. Your dashboard says the agent is performing.

That is why the consumer numbers keep moving the wrong direction while the models keep getting better.

SurveyMonkey's 2026 data has the share of people who would rather deal with a human than a chatbot rising from 83% to 85%, while preference for AI slipped from 7% to 5%. Zendesk found 74% get frustrated having to repeat information they already gave. A Parloa poll found 43.9% of Americans resort to yelling "human" or "person" into the phone to get away from an AI agent.

A better model does not fix either problem. Owning your data fixes the first. Listening to the audio, not the transcript, fixes the second.

Right now most dealers are measuring calls the AI handled. The caller who gave up and hung up counts as one of those.

[Toddlearsmith @Toddlearsmith]

Everybody tells you AI changes the dealership.

Nobody will name a job.

Two years of conferences, vendor decks and LinkedIn posts. Not one has said which seat in your building goes away, or when, or what you are supposed to do with the person sitting in it.

So I named all twenty.

I built a model on NADA Data 2025. 66 people, five departments, every position in a franchised rooftop. Then I ran what actually happens to each one.

Some of it I expected. A lot of it I did not.

Your payroll goes up, not down. Your techs turn more hours and flat rate pays them for it.

The most exposed seat in the building is your warranty administrator. Nobody has ever walked into a 20 group worried about that seat.

There is no BDC line on a factory statement. No F&I department either. Two of the three most exposed groups in your store are the two nobody has ever managed as a department.

And the one that should bother you most. Leave your pay plans alone and you cut your own return in half. Same software. Same spend. One answer.

It is interactive. Put your own headcount in and the whole thing rebuilds around your store, seat by seat.

Go find yours.

Link in the comments.

[Toddlearsmith @Toddlearsmith]

That showroom is from 1977.

Everything in the photo has been replaced. The carpet, the wood paneling, the Granada, the LTD, the guy who sold them.

Everything except the operating model.

New, used, F&I, service, parts. Gross attributed by department. Pay plans written against department gross. The DMS took the org chart that already existed, encoded it into software, and the factory standardized the financial statement on top of it. That structure has barely moved in fifty years while everything else about the business has.

Then we spent three years bolting AI onto the outside of it.

Here is a test worth running with your managers in the room. Cancel every AI product in your store tomorrow. What does Monday look like?

It looks like 2019, running a little slower. Not one process missing. Not one decision orphaned. Nothing structural to rebuild, because nothing structural was ever built.

That is not a failure of the tools. Bolt-on was the only thing available. You cannot build something native on data you do not hold, using operations you cannot call.

What has changed is that the constraint is now addressable.

New whitepaper: The Dealership Nucleus.

24 pages on what an AI-native store actually looks like, the three constraints that belong to our business alone, and the build order that gets you there. Including the one nobody says out loud: your org chart is not just routing information, it is clipping gross.

Link in the comments.

[Toddlearsmith @Toddlearsmith]

Happy 4th of July!

[Toddlearsmith @Toddlearsmith]

Really proud of our team at QoreAI and what we continue to build. https://t.co/vgpEc8OIUZ

[Toddlearsmith @Toddlearsmith]

Read the truth about Dealership AI https://t.co/RfE5TyudCi

[Toddlearsmith @Toddlearsmith]

How AI is reshaping dealership operations, data strategy, the intelligen... https://t.co/Zey9M0hYo1 via @YouTube

[Toddlearsmith @Toddlearsmith]

Every dealership meeting starts with the same ritual:

Someone opens a dashboard.

Then the room debates whether the numbers are correct.

That’s not a reporting problem.

That’s a data architecture problem.

[Toddlearsmith @Toddlearsmith]

Dealerships don’t have a data problem.

They have a decision problem.

The average store has 10+ systems recording information.

Almost none have a system turning that information into clear decisions.

That’s the real AI opportunity.

[Toddlearsmith @Toddlearsmith]

If your vendor resists API or SFTP…

Ask yourself why.

Data companies shouldn’t fear data movement.

[Toddlearsmith @Toddlearsmith]

AI trained on bad data doesn’t get smarter.

It gets more confident.

That’s worse.

[Toddlearsmith @Toddlearsmith]

Every vendor says:
“You own your data.”

Try moving it freely.

Watch what happens.

[Toddlearsmith @Toddlearsmith]

Dealers don’t have a data problem.

They have a data mobility problem.

Big difference.

[Toddlearsmith @Toddlearsmith]

If your “data platform” can’t ingest standard data formats…

It’s not a data platform.

It’s a container.

[Toddlearsmith @Toddlearsmith]

AI won’t replace your BDC.

It will replace:

manual follow-ups

random call lists

guessing who’s in-market

CRM archaeology

If your team adds value beyond that, they win.

If not, that’s a different conversation.

[Toddlearsmith @Toddlearsmith]

If integration requires “significant resources,”
portability was never the priority.

Control was.

[Toddlearsmith @Toddlearsmith]

$500B+ is flowing into AI infrastructure every year.

You don’t raise that kind of capital by saying:

“This will modestly improve workflows.”

You raise it by promising revolution.

Reality in dealerships?
Task compression. Not extinction.

[Toddlearsmith @Toddlearsmith]

Dealers aren’t going to lose headcount first.

They’re going to lose excuses.

“No time.”
“No visibility.”
“Didn’t know.”

AI kills those.

After that, margin gets exposed.

[Toddlearsmith @Toddlearsmith]

AI isn’t eliminating dealership jobs.

It’s eliminating the lazy parts of dealership jobs.

If 30% of a role disappears and performance drops,
the problem wasn’t AI.

It was the role design.