Missed service calls alone cost the average U.S. franchised dealership more than $70,000 per month in lost revenue — and 43% of qualified internet leads are mishandled before they ever reach a salesperson — according to a new Impel report that makes the case for agentic AI as the next operating standard in automotive retail.

“The Dealership Is Not a Building Anymore,” draws on in-market production data to quantify both the cost of inaction and the upside of deployment. On the service side, up to 40% of service calls go unanswered, and up to 60% of those customers never receive a callback, according to the report.

Dealerships that deploy agentic AI to manage service retention report a 27% increase in repair orders from existing customers, a 33% lift in lapsed customer winback rates and a 24% increase in vehicle repurchase rates.

On the sales side, dealers running agentic AI across variable operations report a 31% lift in appointment set rates, a 90% improvement in internet lead conversion rates and a 50% reduction in advertising cost per vehicle, according to the report.

“The automotive lifecycle is simply too long, too multi-channel, too complex, and too high-volume for any human team to maintain consistent, personalized engagement across every touchpoint for every customer,” the report states. “Agentic AI stops the need for that trade-off.”

Read the full report at Impel