11:08 am, June 10, 2025
Car dealerships are increasingly integrating AI into day-to-day use, with new and interesting ways to problem solve and analyse the business.
On the latest episode of the Car Dealer Podcast, Motorway CEO and co-founder Tom Leathes spoke about the ways that his business is using AI and machine learning to streamline tasks and also improve customer service.
However, he explained to hosts James Baggott and Jon Reay that Motorway is hearing from car dealers who are using new, innovative ways to use AI all of the time.
You can click play below to hear the interview in full as well as the top stories of the week.
‘A couple of interesting ones I’ve heard recently,’ said Leathes. ‘Mechanics in the service center, when they’re coming up against electrical problems, taking photos of that, uploading it to ChatGPT, and saying, “what’s going on here?” and it will have a conversation.’
He explained: ‘It’ll instruct that they need to take that off and show it the bit underneath. And then it will say, right, move the red wire to here. You can tell I’m not an electrician, but it tells you what to do.
‘This dealer was saying that there are a couple of the mechanics that are using it, and they’re just getting stuff done so much faster. It’s then, making sure that all the other mechanics at least talk to them and understand how they’re using it.
‘So I think there’s, there’s some really good, good use cases cropping up that I think just need to be, need to be highlighted a lot more for people.’
The Motorway boss explained that they recently hosted a conference for car dealers, covering the topic of AI, and many came away from it saying they want to know the top ways they can use it in their dealerships.
Leathes said: ‘We’ve been using AI machine learning and some of these tools within the product for quite a long time.
‘We’ve got some great talent that are really working on the cutting edge of it, and so that’s given us a lot of product benefit, where we’re able to make the experience a lot better for customers in multiple ways with it.
‘One of the things we’re thinking about most at the moment is how we, how we drive the internal adoption of AI tools to improve productivity within the business, and I think what’s interesting about it.
‘I’m pretty sure that this is the same in every business, and all of our dealer partners as well, is that everyone’s playing around with it at the moment.’
He added: ‘The challenge, I think, for organisations, is to pull out all of that best practice and make sure that it’s shared. And that’s something we’ve been spending a lot of time on over the course of this year, which has had some real benefits, and we’re seeing that with lots of our partners as well, when we ask them how they’re using it.
‘But even in legal teams, customer service, marketing, there’s lots of really interesting things that people have done, and so we’re making sure that is shared across the organisation, and then the best practice things we’re then putting into our training for new starters.’
This week on the show Rebecca Chaplin joined the show for the second half after a surprise departure from James, and her and Jon shared their top stories of the week including positive new car sales expectations, electric car demand, FCA addressing what may happening after the court case.
You can find the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Podcasts and more by searching Car Dealer Podcast now.
