Automotive Business Magazine – Q3 2026 – Digital edition - Flipbook - Page 21
INT ERVIEW
AUTOFLOWS
support team, including the ability to
pin down servicing needs and book
appointments.
This brings with it its own concern,
though. Surely, for every person gleefully
using ChatGPT to make all decisions,
there will be others who hear an AIgenerated voice on the end of the phone
and instantly disengage?
Malcolm thinks the product will prove
itself, saying: “The provocative answer is
that, when we work with call centres and
agents today, you hear frustrations about
quality, knowledge. Customers complain
about agents not knowing things, not
calling at the right time. The human
factor has its weaknesses. Human ability
goes up and down.
“If AI agents have all the data, the
context, then they can probably do as
good a job as a really good average
agent. Maybe not the top, most
passionate, ‘wow’ agent. But maybe that
passionate person could spend their time
doing even better things.
“There will be things that are out of
scope [of the AI], but we need to set
expectations about where it is that
we are OK with getting a high quality
answer, backed by data.”
He adds: “With the margins we have,
we have to be more efficient at the same
time as we have to be proactive.”
Laredius feels that the willingness
to adopt and engage with this new,
futuristic tech will also vary depending
on the market.
“If I get a call [from an AI] that says
‘hey, your car is due a service’, then that
has
as increased the customer experience,”
he
e explains. “The important thing is not
to
o start with everything at once – try it
out. The UK market is definitely more
mature
ature than Italy’s, or France’s, and so
on. That means that they more or
less expect a call from a human
being.
“But it depends. If that
human cold-calling me is
not
ot relevant – maybe I don’t
even own the car any
longer – then it’s
different.”
There is,
off course,
a deeper
cultural
discourse
PER LAREDIUS
about AI in 2026 – namely, a headlinegrabbing concern about its impact, both
environmental and social.
Hype versus reality
“Things tend to come in waves,” Malcolm
says. “So, are we right now in a period
of ‘AI hype’ versus ‘AI reality’? I don’t
know. I think people with grey hair would
say, ‘Ah, I've been through these phases
before, when the web came in’. But this
is a systematic change.”
When addressing the fear about job
losses, he notes that the automotive
industry is one where there is a physical
product, with a real need for human
interaction and oversight.
“There are, of course, worst case and
good case scenarios,” Malcolm says.
“There are concerns, definitely, about
how these models can evolve, but I think
right now, the things that we are taking
away from dealers, it is with joy and
happiness, because finally they can be
more together with the customers – call
them at the right time, serve them better.
That's still, I think, the dream.”
In order to ensure that this dream
is realised, data hygiene is important.
The Autoflows Summit focused on ‘data
cleansing’ for those dealerships looking
to modernise, which might have decades
of legacy data.
“There's been so much pain in updating
data, getting the data quality right,”
Malcolm says. “No one really wants to do
that stuff, and it’s an extra cost. That's
where we have to help the industry as
a whole become more efficient. Part of
that is finding a good partner.”
Manufacturers increasingly require
dealerships to improve data quality
as part of their partnerships, creating
additional time and cost burdens on
already stretched teams.
Laredius says: “We start by
asking whether they know th
their
customer retention number,
numbe
and not just at group level, but
at location, brand and vehicle
level, too. Most of them don
don’t.
"The whole idea is the
granularity: once they hav
have
that full visibility, they've
they'v
got a baseline they
can actually start to
t
improve from. And it's
not only retention – →
