CONSUMERS
83%
of consumers say AI will reshape car buying within the decade. More than 80% expect to use AI in a meaningful way during their next purchase.
Consumers are beginning to shop with AI brokers that research, negotiate, decompose a worksheet from a photograph, and broadcast "beat this offer" to every store in the market. Alturus builds for both sides of that transaction: AI that takes the consumer's perspective seriously, and a dealership operating model that stays profitable when opacity stops paying.
The traditional close ran on information asymmetry: blended numbers, serial paperwork, urgency manufactured in the tower. A consumer AI agent dissolves all three. It prices the trade independently, separates payment from price, and asks four competing stores to do better — in minutes, politely, without fatigue.
of consumers say AI will reshape car buying within the decade. More than 80% expect to use AI in a meaningful way during their next purchase.
of dealers believe AI will be important to their operations. The gap between those two numbers is the largest unpriced risk in automotive retail.
of buyers say the ideal purchase blends online and in-store. Only 7% transact fully online. Test drives, trades, and delivery still anchor the rooftop. What disappears is the opaque close — not the dealership.
Source figures: Cox Automotive Car Buyer Journey Study & industry research, 2025–2026
A buyer's AI broadcasts "who can beat this offer?" to every store in the market and expects a structured answer in minutes. A human desk can't respond at that pace — an Alturus agent can. It assembles a firm, transparent offer from live inventory, current incentives, real taxes and fees, and your floor-plan position, shows the math, and routes it for one-tap operator approval. You stop losing deals to whoever answered fastest with the least honesty.
When four out of five consumers plan to bring AI and two out of three dealers haven't planned at all, preparation itself becomes the advantage. Alturus runs an Agent-Readiness Assessment across every rooftop in your group — then rebuilds the profit model around the four levers that survive transparency.
When deals close in 40 minutes instead of 4 hours, the same desk closes more of them. Cycle-time is the new gross: lower floor-plan interest, faster inventory turns, more units through the same fixed cost.
Buyers currently sit idle for 40% of their in-store time while staff re-key what was done online. Agent-mediated deals arrive pre-structured, pre-approved, and verified — cutting the labor cost embedded in every close.
Products an agent can read — transparent prices, plain terms, real value — get recommended by the buyer's own AI. Penetration shifts from pressure to relevance, and chargebacks fall with it.
Service, trade cycles, and repurchase are where trust compounds. A store that treated the buyer's agent honestly becomes the default answer the next time that agent is asked, "where should I service?" — and "what should I buy next?"
Whoever the consumer's agent turns out to be — an AI lab's assistant, a fintech's broker, a marketplace bot — it will need a trustworthy endpoint to transact with. The incumbents have every incentive to keep that rail proprietary. Alturus keeps it open: a published deal schema any consumer agent can query for live inventory, firm pricing, structured finance terms, and binding appointment slots, with your data staying your data.
The stores that win the agent era won't be the ones that hid the numbers longest. They'll be the ones whose numbers were good enough to show first.
We score every rooftop against the agent-era baseline: can a consumer AI find your inventory, get a real price, book a real appointment, and verify your numbers? Most groups score lower than they expect. Now you know exactly where.
Alturus frontend engineers configure the desk on-site — to your desking rules, your lender set, your floors. Agents then answer consumer agents in machine time: transparent offers, math shown, operator approval gates. Your team keeps the moments that still need a human: the drive, the trade, the handshake.
Velocity, cost-to-close, menu F&I, and retention — instrumented in the same Alturus forecasting surface your executives already use, with drill-down to the VIN and to the deal.