Swirl AI and the New Era of Car Sales

 Waiting for AI to solve a car sales problem? Swirl AI is on it. 

As of June 2025, there are 16,972 new car dealerships in the U.S., according to NADA, the National Automobile Dealers’ Association. From June 2024 to June 2025, those new car dealerships collectively spent $4.8 billion on advertising. 

What does all that money get those dealerships and large dealership groups? There’s certainly traffic, but are they buyers? Most industry benchmarks say between 2 percent and 5 percent submit a form or chat with an automated chatbot on a dealership’s website. 

I've worked for years to get high traffic numbers for a third-party website, and with great success. The truth is, they don’t know how to monetize that audience and frequently cannibalize their own audiences and client profit with ineffective, poorly planned, and clunky tools.

In my experience, the older the third-party site, the less motivated they are to serve consumers' needs and sell to them. Biggest audience? Don’t care. 100 years old, so what? These organizations don’t seek to add value to consumers' lives; they want to extract value from dealerships at an ever-increasing rate. It’s literally an entire business model – from auctions to floor planning loans, and everything in-between, extracting more money while playing a shell game with “value” and “leads,” even changing the very definition of a qualified lead. "These aren't the leads you're looking for..." 

New Role of AI

Enter AI. New AI tools are already being implemented in the dealer sales arena. Specifically, Swirl AI applies an agentic AI strategy to streamline the dealer sales process. The key thing about AI is that it can replace bad digital tools and enhance good consumer experiences at the same time. By putting consumers first, AI tools will enhance an already good experience. That’s where Swirl AI comes in. 

Swirl is an open-source, enterprise-grade AI search platform that connects to existing data sources—such as databases, email, and cloud storage—without moving data. This enables secure, real-time AI-powered search and "chat with your data" functionality using LLMs.

Swirl AI has an AI sales experience already in place in the U.A.E. with brands like BYD and Toyota. McKinsey & Company, a premier global management consulting firm that advises top corporations, governments, and organizations on strategy, operations, and technology, estimates that agentic AI, like Swirl, could unlock $300 to $400 billion in annual value across the automotive sector alone by 2030. 

Death to Chatbots

Today, we have those awful dealership website chatbots with a cute name like Jenni or Tyler. If a shopper asks "Jenni" about towing capacity, cargo space, or fuel economy, the chatbot can only take a name and a number. A sophisticated chatbot can offer pre-determined choices like “Schedule Service” or ask if you’d rather be contacted by email. 

Even the dealership hates the chatbot, the salesperson who follows up after a chatbot or lead form interaction NEVER reads the info the shopper entered. They literally have to ask all the same questions the chatbot asked all over again. In most instances, having a phone number is enough for a salesperson to pick up the phone and start asking, “When can you come in?” It’s a terrible customer experience. All that chatbot money and advertising and third-party spending – all those people going to the website and… a 2 percent conversion rate? Even on an amazing day, 95 of 100 website visits leave without performing a reasonable action – the website and costly inventory management tools don’t sell cars! Swirl AI does, but this does not replace an experienced salesperson. 

How? Kaizad Hansotia, Founder and CEO, Swirl, put it like this: 

“Think about what happens on the showroom floor. A good salesperson reads the buyer. They ask about family size, driving patterns, and budget. They walk over to two vehicles and explain the tradeoffs in plain language. They sit down, calculate a real monthly payment with today’s rates, factor in a trade, and book a test drive for Saturday morning. The entire experience is personalized, visual, and guided. Now think about what happens on the website. The buyer gets a search bar, a grid of inventory tiles, and a handful of CTA buttons that all lead to forms. 'Get Your ePrice.' 'Schedule a Test Drive.' 'Value Your Trade.' Each one asks for personal information before it gives the buyer anything useful in return. The experience is transactional before it’s consultative. It’s the opposite of how people buy.”

Swirl AI combines the experiences of the website and consultative salesperson. In short, it sells, even aiming shoppers toward a specific vehicle that fits the needs they’ve already expressed in a real-time, verbal conversation with Swirl’s agent. 

The Bar is Low

Brian Pasch, who has spent nearly two decades studying automotive digital marketing and whose CRM and CTA research reports are the industry’s most cited benchmarks, has been quantifying exactly how deep this problem runs. His 2026 CRM Research Report surveyed over 330 dealerships and found that CRM reporting capabilities scored an average of just 6.5 out of 10 — what Pasch called “a failing grade.” Hansotia adds, “The question every dealer group should be asking is not ‘how do I get more traffic?’ It’s 'why is the traffic I already have leaving without buying?’” 

According to Hansotia, here's how Swirl AI works, in practice:

“A buyer lands on a vehicle page. The AI reads their browsing behavior — what they’re scrolling past, what they’re lingering on, where they seem stuck. It surfaces a contextual nudge. Not a generic “Can I help?” but something specific: “Curious about real-world fuel economy in stop-and-go traffic?” or “Want to see how the cargo space compares to the Telluride?”  When the buyer engages, the AI doesn’t just answer. It acts. It navigates the website on behalf of the buyer. It pulls up two vehicles and generates a side-by-side comparison with real tradeoffs explained in plain language — not bullet points from a brochure, but the kind of detail that comes from analyzing millions of real-world owner reviews, YouTube walkthroughs, Reddit threads, and automotive forum discussions.”

In short, Swirl is doing all the work that a shopper currently has to do, much of it via a collection of random online sources, most of them require leaving the dealership site. Maybe they come back, maybe they don't.

Here's a walkthrough video:

Total Game Changer

This isn’t just theory; Swirl proved its worth in the real world. BYD allowed a live deployment on their consumer website using several different models. 

After 90 days, the BYD deployment resulted in “Over $10 million in incremental sales in 90 days. 13% of engaged website visitors booked a test drive…” according to Swirl AI. In fairness, it’s important to point out that BYD, globally, is the hot ticket in terms of new vehicle sales lately, so that interest may be partially responsible for some of the increase. 

Anyone looking for an AI success story, not overpromises, not dystopian predictions, look to the dealership experience as the perfect example. Swirl means more money for small businesses in communities across the U.S., and the only “person” to lose their job is “Jenni,” the chatbot avatar. Thank goodness, she does a terrible job.