ABM_1 - Flipbook - Page 50
Q&A
Keyloop
First of all, could you introduce yourself
for the readers?
I'm the CEO at Keyloop, having joined in
2021. I'm coming up for five years in the
motor trade, and before that I was with
software companies in different sectors,
including banking.
It sounds really different, but it's a lot
of the same challenges. There's a lot of
existing software, and we’re trying to
serve customers who increasingly want
to do things digitally, not just in person.
It's about getting that blend right.
The financial industry went through
the transformation to mobile banking,
and ultimately what we're trying to do
here as well is provide convenience and
ease of use. So, I'm a software person
by background, but after five years in
automotive, I can say I have actually
really enjoyed it.
This sector has a real sense of itself
as an industry. It's an incredibly
complicated ecosystem, but it's also a
place where a lot of people know each
other. That gives it an identity. It’s almost
like a close family operation.
Where does Keyloop sit within
that family?
We've been around for a long time in one
form or another. We have 40 years of
provenance in various iterations, and our
predecessors have served automotive
retail through several decades.
At the simplest level, all software
companies go through life-cycles, and
one of the things you've got to try to do
as a business is make sure you get back
into the arena of launching new things.
‘New’ in this market means more
convenient, similar to what people are
using in their home life. It used to be
that the computers at work were better
than the ones you had at home, then that
50
AUTOMOTIVE BUSINESS Q4 2025
Jessica Bird speaks
with Tom Kilroy, CEO at
Keyloop, about how
tech advancements
could revolutionise the
vehicle lifecycle
changed – now at home is much more
convenient than at work, and what we
need to do is bring that convenience
back to the workplace.
Sometimes when a dealership
implements new tech, it takes a while to
learn how to get the best out of it. We
want to make that a lot easier.
Quite a lot of the barriers to adoption
are simply people being set in their
ways, so how do you get past those
more ‘emotional’ restrictions to
tech take-up?
I’ve got sympathy with people at the
ground level in retail. What people
are trying to do day in, day out is just
make the month, staying on top of
their numbers.
You've got big trends in the market,
like the advent of electric vehicles (EVs),
tariffs, the cost-of-living crisis – there’s
a whole lot going on that people are
already wrestling with, while just trying
to deliver the best business that they can
that quarter.
So, that's job number one. Then, the
problem is, how do you stand back
and work out whether we can do this
differently? I think we can.
If the response to ‘could we do this
differently?’ is difficult to understand or
access, or feels like it will take too long,
very quickly people are out. This stuff has
got to be intuitive – like Keyloop’s artificial
intelligence (AI) tools for workshop
management. Workshop managers
are very experienced. They know what
they’re doing, moving this job to that
technician, and so on. With this tech, your
job gets easier rather than harder. You
can see everything laid out, and you’re
more likely to be able to adapt.
In the past, the problem with
technology has been that the user
experience isn’t very good, and the
