In April, PureCars announced the acquisition of AutoAlert, pairing PureCars’ data and marketing expertise with AutoAlert’s data mining, CRM, engagement and loyalty solutions. The increasingly AI-powered company now counts nearly 5,000 dealer clients and 25 OEMs among its partners.

PureCars CEO Lauren Donalson joined the company in 2015 after growing up in her family’s dealer group, earning a business administration degree from Texas A&M and spending five years at GS Marketing. She sat down with AI Dealer News to talk about the past, present and near future of dealer- and consumer-facing AI.

AID: Lauren, when you joined PureCars about 10 years ago, was AI even a twinkle in your eye?

Donalson: I was our dealer group’s very first internet salesperson in the mid-2000s, and when I arrived at PureCars, we had just started to dip our toe into digital media. Dealers had not really even embraced social media. TikTok didn’t exist. AI was a figment of our imagination. And I don’t think I’ve seen anything quite like the velocity at which you’ve seen this tech evolve and influence our day-to-day lives, professionally and personally.

AID: Which is saying a lot, considering you were in retail when the internet happened. Did your group embrace the web early and often? Or did you at some point find you had some catching up to do?

Donalson: Candidly, I think it was a little more of the latter. In our rural part of Southeast Texas, our consumer base was a bit behind as well. But we saw what the bigger groups were doing and embraced what we thought would appeal to our market.

AID: What do dealers need to know about AI right now, particularly those who may be hesitant or skeptical?

Donalson: I’ve personally been on a journey that started with skepticism and some clunky experiences. But as AI consumes more data and gets stronger, and we are having better experiences interacting and interfacing with AI agents, you’ve seen the public has embraced AI as a way of life.

It’s wild to think about it, but that was not the case just months ago. But it is absolutely the case now, and we need to embrace it. It’s a way of life for your customers. It needs to be a way of life for your business as well.

AID: How have you embraced AI at PureCars, and how does the acquisition of AutoAlert further your efforts?

Donalson: We want to evolve into the rating authority in AI-enabled data management and audience activation. Audience activation starts with audience modeling, which determines which car pairs best with the consumer, then digital media activation. Whether it’s social, OTT programmatic media, paid search or email, the AI models are only as good as the clean data that they eat.

AutoAlert processes over 130 million personalized payments every single day. When you think about the application of that increased data buffet, our AI algorithm just got infinite. We’ll be able to activate audiences in ways that are optimized for the best result for the lowest investment.

And then we’ll also be able to apply those same algorithms to our lead handling agent. We’ll only pass a lead over to a dealer once it’s purchased. Your folks can now have conversations with customers when they’re ready to buy.

AID: If you’re closing a deal, what do you want AI to do and what do you want it to not do?

Donalson: Our policy is that the AI agent does not negotiate with customers. And the reason for that is twofold: First, compliance comes first, especially with the recent regulatory scrutiny of pricing. The second is our shared responsibility for delivering a positive customer experience. We want to put that lead in the trusted hands of dealership personnel.

AID: You mentioned AI is evolving quickly. What do you expect to happen in the months ahead?

Donalson: I expect that we’ll be leveraging AI to analyze a much broader customer journey, not limited to the individual dealership. I think looking at things through an enterprise lens improves your ability to grow your market share as a dealer group or as a manufacturer. You can analyze and optimize towards a faster purchase. So I would encourage dealers to look at and evaluate your costs and processes. Understand what the folks you employ are working on. Figure out whether you can deploy AI and automations that will allow them to spend more of their time on high-impact tasks.

Tariq Kamal is the publisher AI Dealer News, Auto Dealer News and Dealer Agent News.