Tekion Unveils Enhanced AI Engine, Tekion AI, with Generative AI Capabilities in its Automotive Retail Cloud Platform

September 13, 2023 at 11:00 AM EDT

Roll out of first GPT based capability, Smart Communication, enhances dealer communication with car buyers

Tekion, transforming the automotive retail ecosystem and delivering modern customer experiences through its AI powered business applications, today announced the addition of the Generative AI model to its AI Engine, Tekion AI, which brings together Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computer Vision (CV), and Generative AI (GPT). The first GPT feature, Smart Communication, is already being used by dealers to accelerate productivity and build stronger relationships with prospective customers.

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly evolving and there is a greater advantage for dealerships that implement AI and its range of technologies like ML, NLP, CV and GPT in their day-to-day operations. According to research by McKinsey, GPT has the potential to revolutionize the entire customer operations function, improving the customer experience and agent productivity through digital self-service and enhancing and augmenting agent skills. In addition to improved customer experience and operational efficiency, dealers using Tekion ARC report cost savings and supplemental revenue as a result of the AI capabilities within the platform.

“We have been leveraging AI on the Tekion platform from the very start. The possibilities that Generative AI will open up across the automotive retail industry are endless,” said Jay Vijayan, CEO and Founder of Tekion. “Dealers and manufacturers are excited about the potential for GPT models in their applications, but many are also unsure of how to use it to bring value across their business. We have been working on enhancing our AI engine and building capabilities with GPT models and this first feature we are launching is designed to ease adoption of Generative AI and showcase the upside of it. This is only the beginning; we are committed to ongoing product innovation that delivers value to our customers and continues to move the industry forward.”

Smart Communication leverages the GPT model in the AI Engine, Tekion AI

Smart Communication, part of Tekion Automotive Retail Cloud (ARC) CRM, analyzes and summarizes the communication between dealer sales agents and future car buyers. Through natural language processing techniques, it extracts valuable insights from conversations and in turn generates recommendations and prompts for sales agents to leverage for the next conversation topic. Additionally, Smart Communication has the capability to automatically create emails based on analysis of email and text messages. One Tekion Dealer Partner leveraged the feature in 75% of all sales emails sent in a one-month period.

"Since using Tekion’s Smart Communication, we’ve noticed significantly faster response times and better engagement with our customers,” said Alex Bowsher, Dealer Manager, Carl Black Automotive Group. “This is our first native use of generative AI and the results have been extremely promising. It has helped our agents and salespeople improve their conversations. With Tekion being able to summarize our leads and form persuasive and thoughtful responses for us, we are easily saving 30-45 minutes each day, per agent."

“Tekion’s Smart Communication is an absolute game changer. It addresses a pervasive challenge faced by dealerships nationwide - lead handling,” says Donny Lewis, Marketing Director at Sandy Sansing. “The integration of this AI technology has resulted in an average of 41% faster response times for non-autoresponder leads through the creation of personalized templates for every lead we receive, enhancing engagement. We are thrilled to be partnered with a company that is genuinely committed to revolutionizing the automotive industry."

Currently in pilot, Smart Communication will be generally available in ARC by November 2023. Over the next few months, Tekion will be rolling out more GPT features in the ARC platform to assist other areas of dealers' business, like service, accounting, and more. To learn more about Tekion and Automotive Retail Cloud, please visit https://tekion.com/.

About Tekion

Positively disrupting an industry that has not seen disruption in over 50 years, Tekion has challenged the paradigm with the first and fastest cloud-native automotive platform that includes the revolutionary Automotive Retail Cloud (ARC) for retailers, Automotive Enterprise Cloud (AEC) for manufacturers and other large automotive enterprises and Automotive Partner Cloud (APC) for technology and industry partners. Tekion connects the entire spectrum of the automotive retail ecosystem through one seamless platform. The transformative platform uses cutting-edge technology, big data, machine learning, and AI to seamlessly bring together OEMs, retailers/dealers and consumers. With its highly configurable integration and greater customer engagement capabilities, Tekion is enabling the best automotive retail experiences ever. For more information, visit www.tekion.com.