Titan's AI Progress

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A year can make quite a difference.

At our recent Titan Connect user group meeting, we repeated some questions we had asked dealers twelve months earlier: how they were using AI, where they expected adoption to go, and whether they believed it would have a material impact on their business in the near term.

The shift in response was striking.

Last year there was interest and pockets of experimentation. This year the conversation had moved noticeably towards outcomes - where AI genuinely reduces workload, improves processes and creates measurable business value.

I think that change is really informative. We spend so much time living through technological change day-by-day that it can be difficult to recognise just how quickly things are moving.

But they are moving and they’re moving fast – even if that speed might only become obvious to us when we look back in a few years’ time.

So, rather than wait, I thought it would be a useful moment to take a pause in all this change and note down some thoughts and updates on Titan’s AI journey.

Learning by doing

Our Service AI Booking Agent has now completed around 1,000 live service bookings. We continue to refine the product as usage grows, with voice and outbound communication among development areas we’ll be progressing.

What has interested me most to date though is the reaction from customers. People seem remarkably unconcerned that they are dealing with AI. If the interaction is natural and the outcome is right, the technology becomes irrelevant.

That is an important lesson. The customer cares about the result – not how it was delivered. The interactions have by and large been rated very positively but you can also see from metrics such as language, #steps to booking, and conversation time, that this is already a very normal medium for most users.

We have also started live dealership testing of our Business AI Insight Analyst, which we previewed at AADA in July. It combines rich visual dashboards with natural-language AI analysis and forecasting allowing users to deeply interrogate dealership data in ways that previously required significant specialist effort.

The early response has been extremely encouraging, but testing these products in real dealership situations is the only way to ensure they’re hitting the mark on functionality and delivering with genuine value.

This is the fun part – putting it to work, seeing how it goes and iterating improvements.

There’ll be more to report on this before the end of the year.

Start with your foundations

At AADA this year I spoke about the foundation’s dealerships must have to maximise their AI opportunity and the more artificial intelligence products I see, the stronger that view becomes.

Before worrying too much about which AI tool you might need in three years’ time, look at the environment it will have to operate within.

Where is your data? How accessible is it? Can your systems communicate easily? Can applications securely read and write information back to source? How clean and usable is the underlying data?

These may be the boring topics of the AI conversation but believe me, they’ll be the most important – and I think we’ll find out who’s been paying attention to it in a few years’ time!

‍The power of partnership

Our Head of Integrated Partnerships, Adall Tayeb recently joined Podium’s Ed Tapley for an industry webinar discussing AI and integration. One of the strongest themes was that the quality of the AI experience is inevitably constrained by the information and systems it can access.

Today that might only affect a booking tool accessing a DMS scheduler or a support bot accurately answering a question.

Tomorrow it could affect the digital avatar that’s the AI representative for your business, or specialist AI agents moving between your DMS, website, CRM, communications platforms, and finance systems to complete deals with your customers.

If the appropriate information isn’t available then no matter how impressive the front-end tool, the experience will be compromised.

So, as with data foundations, whilst AI gets the headlines, the quality of integration will have a huge impact on outcomes, and conversations like the one between Adall and Ed can only help to highlight this as a real opportunity.

What happens to the people?

There was another part of the Titan Connect event that I found encouraging.

When we asked attendees to think about what would identify winning dealerships in 2030 and beyond, AI capability naturally featured heavily. There were plenty of ideas for processes and workflows that intelligent agents could take over.

What we didn't hear was a room full of dealers talking about reducing headcount

The conversation was almost the opposite.

The opportunity they saw was removing the repetitive, high-friction, lower-value work that consumes an extraordinary amount of talented people’s day, allowing those people to concentrate on customers, strategy, judgement, relationships and activities that create substantially more value.

That feels like a much healthier ambition than simply treating AI as a cost-reduction exercise.

Having said that, I suspect as AI gets more sophisticated and capable of those higher value tasks, that position will face serious challenge but for now it was a reassuring message for dealership teams

It’s good to share

Our Head of Marketing, Jamie Russell, will explore some of these ideas further with a presentation at AutoTalk Live in Christchurch on the 15th September, sharing practical insights from the AI products we’ve built and helping dealerships understand some of the questions worth asking as they make their own AI decisions.

I think sharing those lessons matters. None of us has a complete map of where this technology is going, and anyone claiming otherwise is probably getting ahead of themselves.

What we can see is the direction of travel.

AI capability is improving quickly. Dealer expectations are changing quickly. And we’re beginning to move from experimentation towards tools that perform useful, measurable work.

For us, that makes the job nice and clear.

Keep building. Keep testing. Keep listening to dealerships, and make sure the platform underneath those tools continues to offer strong foundations and integrations for what comes next.

One thing’s for sure; the pace isn't slowing down… and neither are we.

Matt Kroll
Managing Director

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