Wanna buy a new car? Start chatting right here !! ... [enter text to start]

A few weeks ago, friends of ours hit a deer, totaling their car. I went to the car dealerships to help them buy a new one, because one of their biggest pain points, is dealing with commission salespersons who are hungry and watch the door like a hawk because they have the next "up". Some of the shops were uncomfortable. Smarmy , ingratiating, overuse of your first name and liberties taken with over-familiarity were some of the things that we encountered at the "big-name, huge inventory shops" who advertise continuously on talk radio. We finally met some genuine sales people who were helpful, honest, and didn't play games like running out to the back behind closed doors to "talk to the manager". I want to give a big shoutout to Ogilvie Subaru, who was the dealership that made buying a car easy, who's salespeople had the hallmarks of authenticity, honesty and integrity.

After the deal was done, we stopped for a pizza and talked about the negative experience in buying a car. My friends are an older couple and the woman, who just discovered connectivity, social media, online shopping had never used a computer before, and now she runs her life on her iPad. She said that in light of what went down at the dealerships that we didn't like, she would rather negotiate with a computer.

That was a seminal moment for me. I hauled out my SDK and starting writing a chatbot to sell cars. I finally got it running, but now I need to put some NLP (natural language processing), artificial intelligence, and some emotion cognition into it, so the bot can tell if they are getting frustrated. It works okay now, but its kind of dumb, and I want it to learn with every interaction. I have some neat self-learning ideas and artificial cognition algorithms that I pumped about trying.

I honestly believe that this will be the future of car buying, and AI will severely reduce the number of car salesman. The paradigm now is that the buyer does the research online, and goes to the new car shop to do the negotiation, and close the deal. The new paradigm is that they will do most of the transaction online, including financing, and then go to dealership to pay and pick up the car.

Stay tuned.

#automotive #AI #NLP #chatbots