Impel Chief Product Officer Matt Muilenburg joins Jim Fitzpatrick on CBT News’ Inside Automotive.
For 30 years, dealers have bought hundreds of tools on a single promise: fewer people, doing more. Matt Muilenburg, Impel’s Chief Product Officer, has a blunt read on how that turned out. The average store still moves about the same 10 cars per rep it did before any of it showed up.
So what changed? Not the tools. There are more of them than ever, and you can read exactly what they cost right off the invoice. What changed is that AI is finally capable of delivering the outcome those tools only promised.
Matt’s point is that the problem was never a missing feature. It was that every system hoarded its own data, and no one had the hours to stitch it into a single customer record. That’s the gap AI closes. And it’s why the smart money is moving off point solutions and onto a single dealership AI platform.
Watch the Full Conversation
3 Product Insights You Can’t Ignore
1. The Single Customer View Everyone Promised and No One Delivered
Dealers have chased one connected view of the customer since the first CRM. It never arrived.
The Old Way: Dozens of systems, each collecting its own data in its own silo. Building one customer record meant hand-orchestrating hundreds of vendors. No store had the time, so the data stayed scattered.
The New Way: AI takes on the connective work no one had hours for, reading across your systems through MCPs, APIs, and RPA, day and night, without tiring. Siloed activity finally rolls up into one record.
The Result: The single view of the customer the industry’s talked about for two decades. True one-to-one marketing, because the system actually knows who it’s talking to.
2. Stop Buying a Tool for Every Task
For five years, the playbook was one purchase per problem. A DVA from here, a service-lane product from there, an equity tool from somewhere else.
The Old Way: Every point solution trained in isolation, none of them sharing a brain. You paid for the overlap and inherited the seams.
The New Way: Train one system once on your SOPs, your market, your brands, and your guidelines. Then hire the agents that run on top of it. Matt’s analogy is the phone in your pocket: iOS and Android are the operating system, and everything else plugs in.
The Result: The overlap disappears. Your AI gets more out of the systems you already run, and your budget goes to what actually advances the business.
3. A Voice Bot on Every Line Isn’t a Strategy
Dealers are rushing to put voice AI on the phones, and Matt’s seen where it goes wrong.
The Old Way: Turn a DVA loose on 100% of inbound and call it done. Customers who called for a human hit a computer, and the roughly 60% asking “where’s my car?” get silence, because the dealer batches that status once a day instead of feeding it live.
The New Way: Deploy voice with intent. Pick the journeys that fit, prep the customer for a concierge experience, and wire in live data so the AI can answer the question that’s actually being asked. Matt pointed to a Toyota store that hands new buyers a dedicated scheduling line and coaches them on exactly what to expect.
The Result: A voice experience that lifts CSI instead of tanking it. Spread it like butter across every call, Matt warns, and CSI, sales, and experience all go the other way.
From the Conversation
On the exposure no one’s tracking: About half the dealers Matt talks to say they aren’t formally using AI. Then he asks them to walk their own showroom. Every customer-facing person is already using it, approved or not. The real question isn’t whether AI is in your store. It’s whether you’ve written a single guideline for it. Start with the employee manual.
On the org chart that’s about to change: Matt calls the emerging role the “AI quarterback”: the human on the loop who trains, monitors, and coaches the agents like any great hire. He describes an app in every employee’s pocket that prompts the day’s work in real time. His sharpest example is service-lane car buying. The best dealer he’s talked to sources 35% of inventory off the service drive, while the average store does 1% or 2%. Same process, finally with the missing pieces filled in.
On why he took the job: Matt has six kids, four of them girls, and 30 years of wanting them to walk into a dealership and feel good about it. His honest read is that a lot of buyers, women especially, still don’t, and the guys don’t feel much better. He’s betting AI changes that by raising the quality of every interaction before a customer ever reaches the store. A better experience for the buyer and a better business for the dealer, at the same time.
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About the Guests
Matt Muilenburg is Chief Product Officer at Impel. He’s spent more than 30 years in automotive and AI, with leadership roles at Cobalt and Marchex before joining Impel to lead product.
Jim Fitzpatrick (host) anchors Inside Automotive on CBT News, a leading source of news and insight for automotive retail professionals.
Frequently Asked Question
| Question | Answer |
| Why haven’t dealership tools delivered a single view of the customer? | Because each system collects and stores its own data separately, and connecting it all to one customer record traditionally meant orchestrating hundreds of vendors by hand. As Impel CPO Matt Muilenburg explains, no dealership had the time, so the data stayed siloed. AI closes the gap by reading across those systems through MCPs, APIs, and RPA and rolling the activity into a single record. |
| What’s the difference between a point solution and a dealership AI platform? | A point solution solves one task and trains in isolation: a separate product for voice, another for the service lane, another for equity. A dealership AI platform is the central “brain” a dealer trains once on their SOPs, market, and brands, then powers every agent on top of it. Impel’s AI Operating System is built as that platform, so dealers stop paying for overlap and get more out of the systems they already run. |
| Are dealership employees using AI without approval? | Often, yes. Matt Muilenburg notes that roughly half the dealers he speaks with say they aren’t formally using AI, yet their customer-facing staff already are. That creates a compliance exposure. Impel recommends dealers add clear AI-use guidelines to the employee manual before it becomes a liability. |
| What makes a dealership voice AI actually work? | Thoughtful deployment. According to Impel’s Matt Muilenburg, dealers who turn a DVA loose on every inbound call run into trouble, because about 60% of service callers want a real-time status update the system was never fed. Voice AI works when it’s aimed at the right journeys, the customer is prepped for a concierge experience, and live data sits behind it so the AI can answer the question being asked. |
| What is an “AI quarterback” in a dealership? | The AI quarterback is the new dealership role Matt Muilenburg describes for keeping a human on the loop. This person trains the AI, monitors its performance, ensures compliance, and makes sure it has the data it needs, coaching the agents the way a manager coaches a strong hire. Impel works with dealers to define these roles as AI becomes part of the org chart. |