By John Clavadetscher, Chief Commercial Officer at Impel

Markets adopt transformative technologies through a predictable pattern: consumers lead by defining new behaviors, and enterprises follow with significant investment to capture value. While the digital revolution took over a decade to penetrate both sectors, AI has achieved mainstream status in just two years.

The Rapid March Toward Mainstream Adoption

• 2024: Mass Consumer Adoption. Tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Llama and Grok reached millions of users in days, becoming embedded in daily writing, research, and planning workflows. These use cases pushed AI platforms toward billion-user scales and massive enterprise valuations.
• 2025: The Year of Enterprise Modernization. According to a recent Gartner Forecast, businesses invested an estimated $1.5 trillion on AI infrastructure, training, change management, software and services in 2025. This period also saw the rise of Vertical AI: purpose-built solutions with deep domain expertise, such as Impel AI in automotive and Harvey AI in legal services. These industry-specific models drive direct business performance within their applicable sector. 
• 2026: The Definitive Year for ROI. The focus has shifted from initial experimentation to productivity—the ultimate driver of business profitability and innovation.

Driving Productivity: Customer Velocity in the Automotive Ecosystem

For Vertical AI, productivity is the cornerstone of ROI. In automotive retail, this is defined by Customer Velocity: the rate at which a consumer enters the funnel (via digital lead, phone call, or walk-in) and progresses to a completed transaction.

Leveraging AI to improve Customer Velocity drives measurable ROI across three critical pillars:

1. Elevating Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty

In the AI economy, speed is a baseline expectation. In 2025, Impel processed over 700 million AI engagements, spanning conversational follow-up, voice interactions, marketing programs, and retention campaigns across variable and fixed operations.

• Impact: Faster engagement improves consumer sentiment, increases transaction rates, and strengthens both sales and service loyalty.
• The Result: Dealers using Impel AI see measurable reductions in time-to-sale and higher lead-to-transaction conversion.

2. Maximizing Employee Performance and Retention

For decades, the average dealership sales associate has sold roughly 10 vehicles per month. Despite massive investments in training, software, websites and marketing services (transitioning from traditional media to digital media). This ratio has long remained stagnant.

AI changes that equation:

• Empowered Teams: By automating repetitive follow-up, Impel’s AI suite allows teams to focus on relationship building and white-glove personalization that fosters long-term loyalty.
• The Multiplier Effect: Customers using Impel report a 5-10% increase in sales per associate, pushing averages toward 11.5 units monthly.
• Lower Turnover: Reducing “bot babysitting” and administrative drag increases engagement and decreases burnout. This is vital, as employee costs represent 30–40% of operating expenses, and industry turnover often exceeds 65% annually.

Of course, a dealership’s culture is forged by their workplace environment, employee satisfaction, leadership excellence, compensation, training, and other variables—not just a tech stack. Technology alone doesn’t create a great culture. However, it can certainly protect it. Notably, a significant portion of Automotive News’ Top 100 Dealerships to Work For are already Impel-powered. These elite retailers recognize that while AI isn’t the foundation of their success, it is the technology they use to liberate their people from the administrative drag and soul-crushing work that causes talent to churn. The best employers aren’t just paying for talent; they’re buying back their team’s time.

3. Reducing Inventory Carrying Costs

The average dealership incurs $45–$70 per vehicle per day in flooring interest, insurance, and administrative costs. Increasing Customer Velocity at scale with AI delivers efficiency gains as associates move units faster, materially reducing these holding costs. Faster inventory turns directly improve operational efficiency and bottom-line dealership performance.

The Verdict on AI ROI

Impel’s case studies confirm that Customer Velocity is the engine for productivity, enhancing engagement, improving staff retention, and reducing inventory drag.

Special thanks to my friend and mentor, Brian McMaster, Director, Variable Operations at Hendrick Automotive Group, for his invaluable insights on the role of Customer Velocity in driving dealership performance.

Experience the ROI of increased customer velocity. If you’ll be at NADA, be sure to come by the Impel booth #4331W to see our Automotive AI Operating System firsthand. If you’re not attending or don’t want to wait, reach out to me directly or schedule a consultation with us.