Coffey: The AI conversation every dealer needs to have

By Melissa Coffey

This article originally appeared in the August issue of Powersports Business.

Let’s get one thing out of the way: AI is not coming for your dealership. Apathy is. I’ve spent the last year watching artificial intelligence go from conference-keynote buzzword to something dealers are actually deploying on the floor, in the service bay, and in the back office. 

The DMS and CRM providers have raced to build AI into their platforms this year, and the pitch decks all promise the same thing — work smarter, sell more, sleep better. Some of it is real. Some of it is a chatbot in a trench coat. Your job isn’t to buy everything with “AI” stamped on it. Your job is to figure out where it actually moves the needle for your store.

Here’s where I’d start.

Lead response is the lowest-hanging fruit in powersports. We are, as an industry, embarrassingly slow to respond to leads. A customer fills out a form on your website at 9 p.m. on a Tuesday, and too often nobody touches it until Thursday. That customer bought a side-by-side from someone else on Wednesday. AI-assisted lead response — instant, personalized first contact across email and text, with a clean handoff to a human once the conversation gets real — is no longer exotic technology. It’s table stakes. If your CRM offers it and you haven’t turned it on, you’re leaving units on the table every single week.

Your service department is sitting on a goldmine of drudgery. Think about how much of your service writers’ day is spent answering the same twenty questions: Is my unit ready? Does this repair fall under warranty? What’s the fitment on this part? AI tools can now be loaded with your warranty documents, service bulletins, and parts data so your team gets instant answers instead of digging through PDFs or putting customers on hold. That’s not replacing your people — that’s giving your best people their time back so they can do the work that actually requires judgment.

AI is changing how customers find you before they ever find you. Here’s the shift most dealers haven’t clocked yet: your next customer may not Google “ATV for sale near me.” They’re asking ChatGPT or Perplexity, “What’s the best side-by-side for hunting property in Central Texas?” If your website doesn’t list real prices, use natural language in your inventory descriptions, and have clean structured data underneath, the AI tools recommending dealers to buyers simply won’t recommend you. The days of hiding the price and hoping foot traffic sorts it out are over. Optimize for the machines, because the machines are advising your customers.

Use it to make better decisions, not just faster emails. The most interesting development this year isn’t content generation — it’s intelligence. Modern platforms can now surface trends across your sales, parts, and service data in plain English: which categories are softening, where your margins are leaking, what your seasonal stocking should look like based on actual patterns instead of gut feel. In a market with uneven demand — and let’s be honest, that’s the market we’re in — the dealer who spots a trend in March beats the dealer who sees it in the June financials.

Now, three warnings

First, protect your data. Before anyone on your team pastes your margins or inventory strategy into a free AI tool, make sure you’ve opted out of data training in the settings. Your competitive advantage should not become someone else’s training set.

Second, keep a human in the loop where it counts. AI drafting a follow-up email? Great. AI closing an F&I deal or handling an upset customer unsupervised? Absolutely not. The powersports business runs on relationships and trust — riders can smell canned in three sentences.

Third, start small. Pick one pain point — lead response is my vote — get it working, measure it, then expand. The dealers who try to boil the ocean in Q3 will be the ones telling everyone at AIMExpo that “AI doesn’t work.”

Here’s the bottom line: the technology gap between dealerships is about to become a profitability gap. The stores that treat AI as a tool — deployed deliberately, measured honestly, with humans firmly in charge — are going to pull away from the stores still waiting to see if this is a fad.

It’s not a fad. It’s the new websites-in-2002. And we all remember what happened to the dealers who decided they didn’t need one of those.

Till next time, shiny side up and checkered flags!