Developments & Future of AI in Dealerships

While there is still some unknown on where AI will go, the technology is here and expanding. John Andersen, a dealer consultant who has worked in modernizing dealerships for 35 years, shared tips on how dealers can future-proof their dealership and equip their teams with the knowledge to leverage new technology during a Farm Equipment webinar. 

Andersen compared the origins of the rapid revolution of agricultural technology in the past 100 years or so, citing that compared to farming back in the late 1800s, “[Today] there’s very little human intervention, a lot of human risk, but very little human intervention in the physical act of farming.” Already in the past there has been a sharp decrease of actual human labor put into the physical side of farming, so the involvement of AI in these processes should not be a deterrent to farmers, he says. 

However, there is a reasonable fear of AI, Andersen says, in response to the exponential growth of productivity caused by new technologies. “What’s scary in the AI world is this is happening in accordance with Moore’s Law, which means year-over-year we’re doubling what our ability is to adopt and use technology until such a point that the technology probably is closer to running us than we are running the technology. And in some respects, that’s kind of where we are today.”

Though AI may seem a bit frightening to many, the benefits of using it in your business are monumental. AI can help gather all sorts of important statistics about a customer like what they purchased, how often they purchased things and how often they needed repairs, Andersen explains. Machine learning, the process of “taking that big data and building machine learning applications around it,” proves essential in artificial intelligence’s ability to forecast and predict what can be done through the information already available, he says.

Countering fears about AI replacing human workers that many may have, Andersen says, “Artificial intelligence is based exclusively on data. It doesn't have intuition, it doesn’t have a gut and it doesn't have the ability to relate human to human.”