Most of the conversations I hear about AI in dealerships start and end in the same place. “We added a chatbot to our website.”
And look, I get it. Customer-facing AI is visible. It’s easy to point to. It feels like innovation you can show someone. But if that’s where the experiment stops, you’re using a sledgehammer to hang a picture frame.
The real opportunity isn’t out front. It’s in the back office, the service lane, the hours your team bleeds every week on tasks that don’t require human judgment. The stuff nobody notices because it just looks like work.
Before I walk you through where to start, let me be honest about where I was a year ago. I knew AI was changing everything. I was reading about it, talking about it on the podcast, and mostly using it the same way most people do: asking it questions, getting answers, closing the tab.
That’s not using AI. That’s using a search engine with better grammar. The shift happened when I stopped asking it questions and started giving it jobs.
And here’s where it gets interesting. Once you learn to give AI jobs, the next step is that AI doesn’t wait for you to assign them. Systems that watch your store, catch what’s slipping, and act before you knew there was a problem. That’s where this is all headed, and it’s exactly what we’re building inside The Dealer Lab right now.
But you can’t skip to the end. The dealers who win with agents will be the ones who built the habits first. So let’s build the habits.
Here’s the thing about starting with AI in your dealership; you don’t need a budget meeting, a vendor demo, or a six-month rollout plan. You need a browser and 15 minutes.
Everything I’m going to describe below works with ChatGPT, Claude, or any of the major tools. Most of them have a free tier. None of them require IT. The entry point isn’t a software purchase. It’s a habit change.
Start by identifying tasks in your store that follow a predictable pattern. Things that happen the same way every time, require information that already exists somewhere, and eat time your team could spend doing something that actually matters. Those are your first experiments.
Your advisors write the same texts and emails dozens of times a week. Declined-work follow-ups. Service complete notifications. Estimate approvals. Delay explanations. Every one of those is a task that can be drafted in seconds with AI.
Instead of an adviser staring at a blank screen trying to figure out how to tell someone their bike isn’t ready until Thursday, they paste in a few details and get a draft back in 10 seconds. They read it, edit two words, hit send. That’s not replacing your advisor. That’s giving them back 20 minutes a day. Multiplied across every advisor, every day, that number gets real fast.
Start here. It’s low-stakes, immediately useful, and it builds confidence with your team that this isn’t something to be afraid of.
Try pasting this into ChatGPT or Claude right now:
“I work at a powersports dealership. A customer dropped off their bike for a scheduled service. We found additional work that needs to be done before the bike is safe to ride. The added cost is $340. They need to approve it before we can proceed. Write a brief, professional text message explaining what we found and ask for approval. Keep it under 100 words. No technical jargon.”
Read what comes back. Edit it to sound like your store. Save it. Do that ten times with different scenarios, and you’ve built a communication template library your whole service team can pull from.
Here’s something most people don’t realize when they start using these tools. You don’t have to write perfect sentences. You don’t have to organize your thoughts before you start. You don’t have to sound professional or polished.
AI is remarkably good at understanding intent. Even if you ramble, switch directions mid-thought, or leave sentences unfinished, it can find the thread and do something useful with it. That changes how you use the tool entirely.
The best example I’ve found in a dealership context is meeting notes. We run a lot of meetings in this industry. We’re not always great at documenting what came out of them. Decisions get made in a room and forgotten by the time everyone gets back to the floor.
Here’s what I do now. When a manager meeting ends, I pull out my phone and use the voice-to-text feature. Not to record the meeting. To debrief it. I just start talking. Out loud. To no one.
“Okay so we talked about the service backlog, Jake needs to figure out why RO close times are running long, we think it’s the parts wait but we’re not sure. Sarah brought up that we’re losing customers at the first service follow-up, nobody’s calling them within 48 hours. We said we’d build a checklist for that. I want to look at our loaner bike policy too, that came up again. John’s going to pull the numbers on that by Friday.”
That whole thing took me about forty-five seconds to say. I paste it into an AI tool and add one line: “Turn this into a list of action items with an owner for each one and a suggested deadline. Format it so I can paste it into a group text.”
Thirty seconds later I have a clean accountability list I can share with the whole team before I leave the parking lot. Accountability dies in dealerships because the follow-through breaks down between the meeting and Monday morning. This fixes that.
And here’s the bigger point: don’t feel like you have to compress everything into a tight, polished prompt. More context makes the output better. If you have two minutes of rambling thoughts about a problem you’re trying to solve, dump all of it in. AI will find your intent even when you can’t find the words.
If you’ve hired recently, you know the pain. You need a service advisor. You stare at an empty screen. You write something generic. You post it and get twenty applications from people who have never touched a motorcycle in their life.
The reason most job posts fail is that the person writing them already knows too much. They assume everyone understands what the role actually involves. So they skip the specifics, use generic titles and bullet points, and end up attracting people who are just job hunting rather than people who actually want to work in a dealership.
Here’s a better way to do it. Instead of asking AI to write a job post, ask AI to interview you about the role first.
Try this:
“I’m hiring for a role at my powersports dealership and I need help writing a compelling job description. Instead of me trying to describe it all at once, I’d like you to interview me about the position. Ask me one question at a time. When you have enough information, write the job post.”
Then just answer the questions as they come. What does a typical day look like? What kind of person has succeeded in this role before? What makes working at your store different? What’s the hardest part of the job that candidates need to know going in?
You’ll end up with a job post that actually sounds like your store, describes the real job, and attracts candidates who know what they’re signing up for.
This same interview approach works for writing SOPs, building training materials, or documenting processes that live inside someone’s head. Instead of asking someone to write it down, ask AI to pull it out of them one question at a time.
Everything I’ve described above is manual. You’re doing the work with AI, step by step.
What comes next is different.
Agents are AI systems that don’t wait for you to ask. They monitor, they execute, they hand off tasks between tools, and they report back. Instead of you bringing the AI to the problem, the agent is already working on it before you knew there was a problem to solve.
An agent could watch your RO board and flag anything over 72 hours with no status update. Another could monitor your first-service follow-up window and send a reminder to the advisor if no contact has been logged. Another could pull your weekly numbers, format them, and have a summary waiting in your inbox Monday morning before you get in.
This is not science fiction. We’re building and testing exactly this inside The Dealer Lab right now. Getting there requires a foundation. The manual habits I described above, clear prompts, useful outputs, documented processes, that’s the groundwork. Teams that skip it and go straight to agents end up automating chaos.
But if you’ve started experimenting and you’re ready to think about what an AI-assisted operating system could look like for your store, that’s the conversation we want to have.
Reach out at max@ownex.io. We’re deep in it and we’re happy to share what we’re learning. Start with the service message prompt. Try it today. It takes four minutes. The rest will follow.
Use it to think out loud. When you’re stuck on a decision, describe the problem to an AI tool the same way you’d describe it to a trusted adviser over coffee. Don’t ask for an answer right away. Just explain the situation, the options you’re considering, and what’s making it complicated. The act of writing or speaking through it often clarifies your own thinking, and the response you get back will usually surface an angle you hadn’t considered.
Ask it to argue against you. Before you commit to a new process or a significant change, paste your plan into an AI tool and ask it to poke holes in it. “What could go wrong with this? What am I not thinking about? Where would this break down inside a dealership?” You’ll catch problems before they find you.
Let it edit, not just create. Paste something you’ve already written, whether it’s an email to a difficult customer, a policy you’re rolling out, or a message to your team, and ask it to make it cleaner, clearer, or more direct. The gap between your first draft and a polished version takes seconds instead of twenty minutes of staring at the screen.
The powersports industry has a transparency and perception problem, and it is called freight and setup.
Consumers see one price online, then show up at the dealership and are presented with another. The dealer then gets put in the worst possible position: explaining charges the customer did not expect, defending fees the dealer did not create, and trying to save trust in the middle of a transaction that should have been exciting.
That is not a good customer experience. It is not good for dealers. And frankly, it is not good for the OEMs either.
This is not a new problem. Dealers have been talking about freight and setup for years. The difference now is that the conversation has changed. This is no longer just about whether a customer gets irritated at the sales desk. This is now about transparency, compliance, advertising risk, and the long-term credibility of our retail model.
The automotive industry figured this out a long time ago. Destination is part of the pricing structure. The manufacturer and the dealer are generally speaking the same language to the customer. That does not mean every automotive transaction is perfect, but the basic advertised pricing framework is far more aligned than what we have in powersports.
In powersports, we have allowed a fractured system to continue for too long. The OEM publishes an MSRP that does not include freight. The dealer is charged freight. The vehicle requires setup, assembly, inspection, and preparation before it is ready for the customer. Then the dealer is left to recover those costs at retail, often as separate line items that the consumer sees as dealer-created add-ons.
That is the heart of the problem.
The customer does not care who created the charge. They do not care whether it came from the OEM, the carrier, the crate, the setup process, or the technician who had to assemble and inspect the unit before delivery. All they know is that they saw one price and then got shown another.
And when that happens, the dealer takes the hit.
The NPDA has released a white paper calling for a better, cleaner, more transparent model. The proposal is simple: OEMs should include freight or destination in the published MSRP, and they should create a formal reimbursement structure for required dealer setup. That could be handled through wholesale pricing, reimbursement, or another clear structure. The exact mechanism can be worked out. The principle should not be controversial.
And to be very clear, this cannot come at the expense of dealer margin. Dealer margins are already under increasing pressure, and any proposal that simply keeps MSRPs close to current levels while forcing dealers to absorb freight and setup costs is not a solution. It is just moving the problem from the customer’s invoice to the dealer’s financial statement, and that is not acceptable. Mandatory costs should not be hidden downstream.
If a cost is required to get the vehicle from the factory to the dealership and make it ready for the customer, then it needs to be reflected in the pricing architecture upstream. Dealers should not be forced to either advertise a higher all-in price that looks uncompetitive against the OEM’s own website or advertise the MSRP and then risk looking like the bad guy when the real transaction price is explained.
That is an impossible position, and it is one dealers did not create. However, this is one of those rare issues where with the NPDA’s proposed solution, everyone can win. Customers win because they get a cleaner, more honest buying experience. They can compare products more accurately. They can shop with confidence. They are less likely to feel blindsided when they walk into the dealership.
Dealers win because they stop being forced to defend a broken pricing structure. They can focus on selling the value of the product, the dealership, the service department, the ownership experience, and the relationship instead of starting the transaction with an explanation that sounds like an apology.
OEMs win because the brand experience improves. The customer’s first real interaction with the product is not clouded by frustration over pricing confusion. Trust goes up, and the conflict goes down. The retail channel gets stronger.
This is not about dealers trying to avoid accountability. Quite the opposite. Dealers are the ones on the front lines every day. Dealers are the ones having the conversations with customers. Dealers are the ones who answer the phones, handle the complaints, and try to make the transaction work when the advertised price and the real-world price do not match.
That is why this needs to change. We are making a strong push to have these changes in place for the 2027 model year. That gives the OEMs time to adjust pricing,
systems, websites, dealer communications,
and internal structures. It is reasonable. It is achievable. But it will not happen unless dealers make their voices heard.
That means every dealer needs to support this initiative.
Call your reps. Email your reps. Text your reps. Bring it up during dealer meetings. Bring it up during 20 Groups. Bring it up at product shows. Bring it up every time you have the opportunity.
Do not assume someone else is handling it. For decades, powersports dealers have struggled to find alignment on the issues that matter. That lack of organization has cost us. It has allowed too many decisions to be made upstream while the consequences landed downstream. But that is changing. The NPDA exists because dealers need a unified voice, and this is exactly the kind of issue where that voice matters.
We also need to be honest about one more thing: if we do not get in front of this ourselves, there is a good chance regulators will.
I’ve spent more than 30 years in this industry watching it navigate crises that threatened to define it. The three-wheeled ATV ban. The personal watercraft wars. I was on the front lines of the PWC fight.
What’s happening today with the e-moto craze feels familiar and that’s exactly what worries me.
When I joined Kawasaki, the median age of the U.S. motorcycle owner was 32. The MIC puts it north of 50 today. Ownership among 18- to 24-year-olds has collapsed from 16% to 6%.
The kids who should be our next generation of customers are out there right now, doing wheelies riding e-moto bikes illegally on busy streets, oblivious to the rules of the road, and heading toward the same cliff we’ve seen before.
To make sure I had my facts straight, I sat down with my first (and favorite) Kawasaki boss, Roger Hagie, a 40-year KMC government relations pro.
The CPSC became aware of a growing number of injuries among inexperienced riders who did not understand these vehicles’ characteristics.
Before the CPSC banned the manufacture and distribution of new consumer-grade three -wheel ATVs in the U.S., the OEMs were already designing age-appropriate model standards and had begun manufacturing four-wheeled vehicles.
Honda, Kawasaki, Yamaha, Suzuki, Polaris, and Can-Am collectively established mandatory dealer guidelines and implemented cancellation clauses for noncompliance. The consent decree took effect in 1987, following the CPSC’s findings of irresponsible rider behavior: impaired operation, failure to wear protective gear, and allowing young riders to operate machines intended for adults.
The lessons learned were painful, but our industry-funded programs that offered incentivized, hands-on rider training for our customers (and their age-appropriate family members) worked.
PWC enthusiasts, mostly new to boating, were causing havoc on the water. They didn’t realize they were operating a vessel and were unfamiliar with basic waterway rules and other important boating practices, such as launch ramp etiquette.
Most importantly, our customers, who loved their zippy two-stroke “motorcycles on water,” weren’t winning popularity contests within the broader boating community.
With the ATV crisis still fresh, I was hired by Kawasaki corporate to help turn the tide against what was becoming a widespread movement to restrict PWC. I had purchased my two stand-up Kawasaki watercraft a few years earlier, and I was excited to fight the good fight.
Compared with today’s e-moto situation, PWC manufacturers collaborated to address rider behavior issues using a variety of effective tactics. This was pre-internet; back then, we didn’t have social media influencers with millions of followers. But stories, complaints, and worst-case scenarios were beginning to surface in the news (print and TV) across the country at a concerning pace.
It may have started as a slow-and-steady roll, but once concerned citizens, regulators, and legislators began seeking solutions, we became very active in promoting our own model legislation. We pushed hard to reinforce that PWC were boats, so the same Rules of the Water would apply to everyone. Predictable navigation on the water was key to staying out of harm’s way.
We partnered with state boating law administrators to create effective educational tools.
We launched a highly successful law enforcement loan program and supported programs that trained water rescue professionals to use PWC to save lives during floods, in swift water, and along coasts.
It worked. Most importantly, our efforts helped bring PWCs and their users into, perhaps grudging, acceptance with the boating community.
The scourge of the mountain — cutting off skiers, ignoring etiquette, with little to no training. The solution wasn’t a ban. It was terrain parks: a dedicated space where risk-takers could push limits without endangering others. Now those parks are standard at every major resort. Without snowboarders, where would the aging ski industry be today?
Motorcycle sales have been cycling downward. The baby boomer base is aging out. Traditional OEMs are watching their core customer demographic shrink. And yet, right now, tens of thousands of kids, maybe hundreds of thousands, are falling in love with two wheels and the freedom of motorized mobility.
The PWC wasn’t planned as a gateway to boating. It became one. This time, we can be intentional. Kids on illegal e-moto bikes zipping through our communities are our future customers. If we figure out how to guide them through this phase rather than dismiss or ignore it, it could be a massive shot in the arm for the next generation of riders.
But the current trajectory is not heading toward a soft landing. That’s the conversation we need to start — and we will, in the columns ahead.
By Brendan Baker | Editor-in-chief
As powersports dealers continue navigating a post-pandemic market, one thing has become increasingly clear: success is no longer about simply having inventory on the showroom floor. Dealers today face mounting pressure from aging inventory, shrinking margins, technician shortages, rising customer expectations and rapidly evolving technology.
In this environment, some dealers are thriving while others are struggling to maintain profitability. According to industry leaders Mark Sheffield, advisor for Woods Cycle Country and board member of NPDA; Gart Sutton, founder of the Best Operators Club; and Donavon Facey, moderator and consultant at NCM Associates, one of the biggest differentiators is participation in a 20 Group.
While 20 Groups have been part of the powersports industry for decades, their value may be greater today than ever before. Through financial benchmarking, peer accountability and the sharing of best practices, these groups help dealers identify opportunities, solve problems and improve profitability in ways that are difficult to achieve alone.
One of the greatest advantages of a 20 Group is access to performance benchmarks. Many dealers know whether sales are up or down, but fewer understand how their financial performance compares to similar dealerships across the country. A 20 Group provides that perspective.
“Twenty percent of dealers lose money every year,” Sheffield says. “A lot of owners simply don’t know what good looks like until they see the numbers.”
Sutton agrees, arguing that understanding dealership financials remains one of the most important skills an owner can develop.
“Dealers who are fluent in their own financials make better decisions in every area of the business,” Sutton says. “Measure yourself against benchmarks and hold managers accountable to specific metrics.”
Facey says the highest-performing dealers focus on key measurements such as gross profit per employee, return on average inventory (ROAI), combined front- and back-end margins, and fixed operations sales as a percentage of unit sales.
Those metrics often reveal opportunities that aren’t visible when owners focus solely on sales volume.
In fact, data from NCM Associates shows top-performing dealerships are keeping nearly 9.8% net profit compared to an industry average of 5.4%. Surprisingly, the difference isn’t driven by dramatically higher vehicle margins.
“When we compare our top 20% dealers to the industry average, new-unit margin is only about one point different,” Facey says. “The bigger difference is inventory productivity and operational execution.”
That kind of insight is why benchmarking matters. It helps dealers understand where profit is truly being created — and where it is being lost.
Inventory remains one of the most discussed topics in 20 Group meetings across the country. Following the pandemic-era boom, many dealerships became accustomed to receiving limited inventory and selling nearly everything they had. Today’s environment is far different.
“Inventory normalization is still the dominant conversation,” Sutton says. “Dealers got comfortable during the pandemic boom and are now sitting on aged units while carrying floorplan costs that are eating into margins.”
The most successful dealers have responded by becoming more disciplined. Facey says top-performing dealerships operate from data-driven budgets and inventory plans. They understand how much inventory they can afford and focus on stocking the right products at the right time.
“They aren’t afraid to negotiate with manufacturers to keep inventory levels healthy and prevent floorplan costs and aging inventory pressure from eroding margins,” Facey says.
Sheffield believes many dealers make the mistake of allowing OEM programs to drive inventory decisions.
“Getting on the OEM program hamster wheel is one of the biggest mistakes dealers make,” he says. “Dealers end up chasing bonuses while selling units at lower and lower margins.”
The common lesson from all three experts is simple: inventory should serve the dealership’s profitability goals, not the other way around.
While inventory often grabs headlines, many 20 Group leaders believe the industry’s greatest opportunity continues to be service.
“Service, without question,” Sutton says when asked which department is most underappreciated.
Sheffield agrees. “Service is one of the highest-margin products a dealer can sell, yet very few dealers focus on customer-pay business,” he says.
Strong service departments generate recurring revenue regardless of new-unit sales cycles. They improve customer retention, support F&I product sales, and often lead to repeat vehicle purchases.
Facey says service will become even more important as vehicles become increasingly sophisticated and customer expectations continue to rise.
“[Powersports] vehicles are becoming more complex, customer expectations are rising, and dealers who provide a better ownership experience throughout the life cycle of the product will be well positioned for future growth,” he says.
Many top-performing dealers are treating service as a business unit rather than simply a support department. They actively market service, monitor service absorption, and invest in technician development.
The same philosophy applies to parts and accessories. Facey believes dealerships often miss opportunities by failing to maximize accessory sales during the vehicle purchase process.
“The biggest opportunity for accessory sales is at the time of purchase,” he says. “Dealers need strong salespeople who can help customers make those machines their own.”
Another recurring topic at virtually every 20 Group meeting is staffing. Finding and retaining technicians remains one of the industry’s biggest challenges, but dealers are also focused on reducing turnover and building stronger cultures throughout the dealership.
Facey says the most progressive operators are developing talent internally.
“Our most progressive dealers are building programs to grow technicians in-house and are working on company culture to retain them,” he says.
Sutton notes that recruitment and retention challenges extend well beyond powersports, making employee development even more critical.
For Sheffield, strong service departments often become a competitive advantage because they create positive experiences for both customers and employees.
“When you see a truly great service department, it’s a magical experience in how it drives additional sales and improves margins throughout the dealership,” he says.
Perhaps the biggest reason dealers continue to invest in 20 Groups is accountability. Financial composites and benchmarking data are valuable, but they only matter if dealers take action.
The best 20 Groups create an environment where owners share challenges, learn from one another and commit to making improvements before the next meeting. That accountability often becomes the difference between knowing what to do and actually doing it.
As dealers look ahead to 2027, challenges will remain. Inventory management, affordability concerns, staffing shortages and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence will continue shaping the industry.
Yet all three experts share a similar outlook. Dealers who know their numbers, manage inventory carefully, invest in fixed operations and focus on continuous improvement will be positioned to succeed.
And for many of those dealers, a 20 Group remains one of the most effective tools available.
Facey’s advice is straightforward.
“Join a 20 Group so you have benchmarks to see how you’re doing and where your opportunities are.”
While Sutton says to scout your 20 Group carefully, because not every group is a fit. He says that a good group is like a family where the members pull for each other and pitch in to lend a hand if necessary.
In a business where small operational improvements can generate significant profit, that outside perspective may be one of the best investments a dealer can make.