By Michael Quigley, President & Chief Strategy Officer, Co-Founder at Impel

People don’t learn this business in a classroom. They learn it in the doing. The new salesperson shadows the veteran, fumbles the first dozen follow-up calls, misreads a trade or two, and slowly, becomes someone worth buying a car from. That apprenticeship has looked the same for decades. It’s also the thing AI is quietly about to change. The role of AI in dealership training won’t be what many of us assume.

Almost every conversation about AI in a dealership aims at the ceiling: how to make the best salesperson faster, how to give the top advisor more at-bats. It’s a natural instinct. You back your best people first. They carry the store. But the research suggests it points to the less-skilled end of the workforce. 

AI helps the least experienced most

In February, the National Bureau of Economic Research published a report on a randomized experiment built around a deceptively simple question: does AI help the strongest performers most, or the weakest? Researchers ran people of very different skill and education through the same work, some with AI and some without. Without it, the higher-skilled group outperformed the lower-skilled by more than half a standard deviation, roughly the distance you’d expect between a seasoned hand and a rookie. With AI, that gap didn’t hold. Three-quarters of it disappeared.

That finding doesn’t stand alone. The landmark workplace study of the last two years, now published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, watched the same pattern unfold inside a real workforce of customer-support agents. Access to AI lifted output by 34% for the newest and least experienced workers, and barely moved it for the veterans. The mechanism is the part worth sitting with. The AI worked by learning the patterns of the best performers and making them available to everyone else. It took what had lived quietly in the heads of a few and put it within reach of the many.

That’s the same insight I explored in Centaurs, Chess, and the State of Vertical AI in 2026, seen from the other side. The knowledge your best people carry has always been your most valuable and least portable asset. For the first time, it travels.

The real job of AI in dealership training

Now put that on your floor. Your real constraint has never been your best closer or your sharpest advisor. It’s the distance between them and everyone else, the median salesperson, the hire in week three, the Saturday floater covering a desk that isn’t theirs. Every one of them is now within reach of your best person’s playbook, in the moment, on the deal in front of them. Those are the high-leverage employees I’ve written about before, and AI is how you make more of them. The first job of AI in a store isn’t to sharpen the person at the top. It’s to pull the middle toward them.

So here’s the question worth sitting with. Where does the next great operator come from?

We’ve always trained our people on the floor. You learned the trade by doing the low-value reps, the calls nobody wanted, the appraisals you got wrong before you got them right. It was an apprenticeship in everything but name, the same ladder the old guilds ran: apprentice, then journeyman, then master, each rung earned by doing the work below it. If AI now handles the bottom rungs, the ones a rookie used to climb, the path from apprentice to master gets harder to find. Raise the floor high enough, and you can saw off the rung people used to stand on to get above it.

That outcome isn’t fixed, though. It’s a choice, and it belongs to the dealer.

Turn AI into the teacher

The same AI that can erase the apprenticeship can just as easily become it. A system trained on your best people’s patterns is, in effect, a teacher, if you use it as one. Let it quietly do a rookie’s work behind the scenes, and they look more productive today while learning nothing. Let it work in the open, showing each move and the reason behind it, and that same rookie picks up in months what used to take years. The difference is whether your people are learning from the AI or just handing work to it. This was never a story about replacing people. It’s how you build more of them, the kind who made the dealership a concierge business in the first place, before scale got in the way.

AI will raise your floor no matter what. The question is whether you let it remove the bottom rung, or make it the bottom rung, the thing that teaches your next generation as they climb. Do that, and you don’t just train people faster. You build a workforce that grew up with AI at its side, fluent in the tools and human where it counts. The machine handles the busywork and teaches as it goes, which frees people to do what only they can: read a customer, earn trust, close with judgment no model has. The dealers who win the next decade are the ones who choose that, deliberately.

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