Jamie Shapiro (left, above) and Jeff Rabkin are the co-founders of Wowza and the inventors of Wowza Dealership AI, a training platform for automotive sales professionals and sales managers. The longtime friends combined their decades of experience in auto retail (Shapiro) and branding and advertising (Rabkin) to make AI a personal coach and the ultimate sales assistant.

Rabkin says the pair asked each other how AI could serve as a “cointelligence” to help the sales team close deals — with ongoing training as well as real-time, customer-specific content generation.

“You have this unique workforce, very diverse in experience, talent levels and abilities,” Rabkin says. “How could AI elevate and improve the whole buying experience by doing things salespeople wouldn’t know how to do or wouldn’t be worth their time?”

In-Person Install

Shapiro and Rabkin’s conversations led them to a hybrid approach: Wowza Dealership AI starts with in-dealership discovery and training days, then equips sales pros to continue training while leveraging Wowza’s toolkit to close more deals.

After meeting with the dealership’s executive team and sales leadership, Shapiro and Rabkin spend two days onsite: The first is for core skills training in large groups; the second is dedicated to more advanced training with small groups and in one-on-ones.

The next time trainees hit the floor, they are equipped with tools like Customer Profiler, which allows sales pros to enter everything they learned from their initial interview. In return, they get actionable and highly detailed intel ranging from questions to ask during the demo to competitor vehicle comparisons weighted by the customer’s stated priorities.

“When I was a salesperson, we had to survive on our ability to connect with customers and solve problems,” says Shapiro, who believes AI can elevate the trade the same way Excel and dealer software have in prior generations. He cites the example of a friend whose social media posts he used to demo Wowza Dealership AI for a general manager.

When she read her profile, “She laughed,” Shapiro says. “The first thing it said was you should have a plug-in hybrid ready. She said, ‘I bought a plug-in hybrid two months ago.’”

Give a Man a Fish …

As with any AI tool, users are encouraged to continually challenge Wowza Dealership AI’s problem-solving abilities. Losing contact post-demo or post-sale? Ask AI to write a communications plan. Struggling to write clear, concise emails? Ask AI to get you started.

“We want to be a coach, a trainer, a psychologist that analyzes consumer behavior,” Rabkin says. “We want to help explain financial problems and issues, be a product expert and a content assistant.”

Shapiro recalls a meeting with a dealer CPA who asked if AI could help him reconcile his group’s expenses, a time-consuming monthly task.

“We spent an hour with him, created a project in ChatGPT, put in an example and, in 10 seconds, it did what he wanted to do,” says Shapiro, who checked in two weeks later to find the CPA had reverted to his manual processes. “We wanted to teach him how to fish. He just wanted to buy fish.”

Leveraging AI requires experimentation, Rabkin adds, rewarding the curious and the customers they serve.

“The power of AI comes from understanding customers. That allows you to tailor communications and generate content unique to each customer instantly, on the fly,” he says. “That’s not the kind of thing that’s going to be easy to put into the CRM.”

Tariq Kamal is the publisher of AI Dealer News as well as Auto Dealer News and Dealer Agent News.