AI WORKING FOR CAR SALES—THE CASE OF AUTOTRADER

(Article published in L’Automobile Collision magazine, October 2023)

By Piero Facchin

Artificial intelligence (AI) is making its way into many fields, including automotive sales, and AutoTrader is the first to put it to work for individuals looking for vehicles, and to take advantage of it through a sales tool aimed at car dealers and merchants.

Luc Morin, Vice President, Sales for AutoTrader, explains: “This is the fruit of a colossal research effort, supported by an experienced team of digital data specialists. We are the very first to offer such a tool. We’ve been working for the past two years on this proposition with our group of professionals who focus on data analysis to build algorithms that will help maximize results.”

Positioning a Vehicle With the Upgrade

To understand how this works, search results are influenced by the type of product customers, or merchants and dealers, use as upgrades. Mr. Morin explains: “An upgrade allows you to position your specific vehicle in different places on the page, for example, in a top spot. If we do a search and the result shows exactly the vehicle you’ve entered, it will appear in that prime spot, i.e., at the top of the page, on both a desktop computer and a smartphone.”

Until now, dealers who have had several vehicles in their yard for some time take the best vehicles among them and place them in upgrades, but the digital data they use is very limited, not knowing what they have as competition in their local market; are there many vehicles like mine, are they sought after by customers?

Over 300 million pieces of data

Mr. Morin adds: “Our system with AI, which we call the ‘upgrade optimizer,’ uses over 300 million pieces of data, enabling us to obtain the best possible results, based on the customer’s (dealer’s) inventory, as well as the quality of their marketing: photos, descriptions, prices, etc.”

Morin points out that the tool was developed in partnership with 200 dealers who were asked to “put it to the test.” What was astonishing during the experimental phase of this project was that dealers achieved a 25% increase in results pages, 20% in detail pages, in addition to a 15% increase in direct requests.

Accelerating Stock Rotation

“The ultimate goal is to accelerate inventory rotation, even in the used-vehicle market. For example, a private individual will be able to search our website with ‘IQ badges’ that will determine whether the price is optimal.

“AutoTrader has 25 million visits. More than 7 million Canadians have downloaded the mobile app to find vehicles on our site. We collaborate with automotive experts to provide credible opinions, videos and other relevant information to help consumers in their vehicle quest.”