Digital Dealer 2026: The Dealers Who Win Are Already Using AI Differently
Written by:
Principal Auto Director
Published:
September 23, 2026
That question kept pointing to the same place: the phone. The phone is the most important touchpoint in automotive retail. It is where appointments get booked, where deals get started, and where customer relationships are made or lost. And for most dealerships, it is also the biggest blind spot in the business.
Keynote speaker Glenn Lundy, founder of 800% Elite, set the tone for the show. The next five years represent the greatest era of opportunity for dealers, he said, but only for those who get the fundamentals right. As Lundy put it: "people, process, culture, disciplined execution, and an uncompromising commitment to the customer." That framework held up across every conversation we had on the floor. The dealers ready to win are the ones who can actually see their operations clearly enough to execute on those fundamentals.
AI That Finds Customers vs. AI That Keeps Them
Industry data shows that the average dealership misses roughly 23% of inbound calls, a gap that can translate to as much as $853,000 in annual revenue loss per rooftop. Operational AI closes that gap. It handles the after-hours call, books the appointment, evaluates the quality of every BDC interaction, and surfaces the patterns a manager would never have time to find manually.
Phone Call Data Is Content. Paired with CRM Data, It Becomes Context.
Here is a scenario that came up on the show floor more than once. A salesperson is out on the lot with a customer when their cell phone rings, five minutes before a scheduled test drive. They take the call, handle it quickly, and get back to their customer.
What happens to the data from a call taken on a personal cell phone?
For most dealerships: nothing. It disappears into a gap between the phone and the CRM, never reviewed, never counted, never acted on. It happened, but as far as the business can tell, it did not.
How many vehicle sales and service appointments last month touched your phone system? Do you have data on all of them, some, or none?
Most dealers cannot answer that. And the ones who cannot answer it are making decisions based on an incomplete picture of their own business.
If you are relying on a lead vendor to report on the calls they generated, who is grading that homework?
You are asking a source with a known conflict of interest to evaluate its own performance. What would it look like if you had independent, objective visibility into every inbound call regardless of where it came from?
If you wanted to train a conversational AI on the last 100 hours of customer calls, to understand trends in objections, service satisfaction, or appointment drop-off, could you get that data quickly and easily?
For most dealerships, the answer is no, because the data was never captured or made accessible in a way that supports that kind of analysis.
That is the insight that resonated most at Digital Dealer 2026. Phone call data on its own is content. Paired with CRM data, it becomes context. The dealers who will win the next five years are the ones who can make that connection.
GoTo Connect for Automotive is built to close that gap. Our unified platform captures every call and connects it to the CRM and DMS systems where your team makes decisions. When a call ends, it shows up where your team works: a follow-up task on the lead record, context that turns a conversation into a coaching moment or a saved deal. AI Quality Management evaluates 100% of BDC calls, not a sample, so nothing slips through unnoticed. Real-time alerts mean a missed opportunity gets flagged before it becomes a lost deal.
Technology That Puts Humans First
When the routine is handled, your BDC team can focus on the conversations that require a human touch. When every call is logged and every appointment is tracked, managers spend less time chasing data and more time coaching. When AI Sentiment flags a dissatisfied customer in real time, someone can follow up before that customer decides not to come back.
With GoTo Connect for Automotive, the routine gets handled so your team can focus on what matters. AI Receptionist handles call routing to make sure the right call reaches the right person. Automated scheduling removes the friction that causes appointments to fall through. The infrastructure runs so the human advantage Lundy was describing actually gets to show up.
Better Data. Better Decisions. Better Outcomes.
The CDP session at this year's show made the case that the dealers best positioned for the next era are those building on a foundation of connected, actionable data. That is not just a technology story. It is an operational discipline story. The visibility to catch an issue before it becomes a pattern, to follow up on a call before the opportunity is gone, to know which calls are covered and which are falling through: that is what execution at the highest level actually looks like.
The next five years will reward the dealers who treat their operations as seriously as their marketing. The ones who turn phone call data into context, who connect every conversation to the systems where decisions are made, will be the ones who execute at the level Lundy was describing.
The opportunity is there. The question is how you capture it.
If you missed us at Digital Dealer, the conversation doesn’t have to wait. Visit GoTo.com/automotive to learn more.
