Devin Daly, Co-Founder and CEO at Impel, has led the remarkable journey of transforming the automotive industry through AI-powered customer lifecycle management. From its inception in 2014 as a pioneering venture in augmented reality and 360-degree imaging technology, Impel, originally known as SpinCar, aimed to revolutionize the car buying experience. Under Devin’s leadership, the company quickly evolved, expanding its product offerings to include multimedia showcases, automated vehicle condition reporting, and more. By 2017, Impel had already integrated Computer Vision AI into its software solutions, anticipating the industry’s need for AI-powered automation. A series of strategic acquisitions in 2021 propelled Impel into the conversational AI space, redefining its vision and scope. Renamed in early 2022, Impel emerged as a global leader, setting the enterprise standard for automotive AI and expanding into multiple industry verticals, driven by a relentless pursuit of innovation and excellence.
Devin, can you share the journey of Impel from its inception to becoming a global leader in AI-powered customer lifecycle management for the automotive industry?
Impel’s driving vision has always been to change the buying journey – and indeed, the entire customer experience – for buyers and sellers alike. The company originally began as SpinCar in 2014, bringing augmented reality and 360-degree imaging technology to the auto industry. By delivering immersive and interactive 3-D website experiences, SpinCar helped improve the user experience, customer engagement, and dealer lead volume. We grew extremely quickly and expanded to create the digital merchandising category in automotive retail, launching additional products like multimedia vehicle showcases, narrated video merchandising, digital protection and service plan merchandising, automated vehicle condition reporting, and more.
Notably, as early as 2017, we were already incorporating Computer Vision AI into our software solutions. Understanding the need for AI-powered automation across the auto customer journey, SpinCar entered the conversational AI space in early 2021 through a series of strategic acquisitions, creating products that had incredible demand and drove continued company expansion. With our phenomenal business growth and industry penetration came the need to redefine the company’s vision, scope, and product portfolio. SpinCar became Impel in early 2022 and continued developing AI applications, evolving into the de facto enterprise standard for automotive AI and expanding into multiple industry verticals.
How has your background in technology investment banking and private equity influenced your approach to running Impel? Having a clear and early long-term vision of emerging technologies and their potential industry applications was crucial to success. The earlier, the better. The first-mover advantage is absolutely real, and it’s critical in the vertical SaaS space – even more so in AI. Leaders must develop a unique vision and then assemble, enroll, and energize a team around them that can achieve it together. Additionally, ensuring a deep understanding of the largest pain points and operational limitations of an industry’s customer lifecycle, financial performance, and operational dynamics is absolutely vital to successful innovation that actually works and generates long-term demand.
Of course, working in investment banking quickly makes it clear: there is no decision that is strategically right but financially wrong! Having a clear and ownable glide path to sustainable profitability and a defined “right to win” is essential to business success (and fundraising) and long-term viability. And of course, the courage, grit, passion, results mindset, and the relentless entrepreneurial spirit which many of the founders we worked with demonstrated are key to success, not just in business, but in life. Our culture at Impel and the way we run the business mirrors these business and financial principles. As a matter of fact, Impel’s core values reflect these learnings, and they’ve largely been our core values since day one – Results, Grit, Inventiveness, Collaboration, Energy, Passion, and Customer Focus.
What were some of the biggest challenges you faced while integrating AI applications into the traditionally outdated automotive retail industry?
One of the greatest lessons we learned early on was that employee resistance to AI was a very real challenge that needed to be addressed in order for dealer groups to realize the full benefits of AI technology. A lethal combination of fear, inertia, apathy and misunderstanding stalled implementations and in some cases led to product cancellations. We termed the challenge “employee sabotage” and we worked diligently in the early days to develop and implement comprehensive change management plans for every one of our new customers. Here are just a few of the areas that we leaned into in order to drive successful adoption of the new capabilities provided by AI:
- Product positioning – From our sales process all the way through to onboarding, account reviews and public marketing, we reinforce the notion of AI as a “copilot” that works WITH existing dealership staff to make them more productive as opposed to replacing them.
- Process & system integration – To reduce friction in day to day activities and make it easy for employees to embrace the new technology, we seamlessly integrate our AI capabilities into existing processes and systems.
- Enabling dealership control – In order to provide dealers with confidence that AI wouldn’t go “off the rails,” we built a number of safeguards including dealer-controlled “guardrails” to inform how the AI should respond to certain inquiries, automatic handoffs from the AI to dealership staff under specific circumstances, and the ability for dealership staff to “take over” AI conversations at any time.
Impel leverages proprietary shopper behavioral data and generative conversational AI technology. Can you explain how this technology enhances the customer experience at automotive dealerships?
Buying and servicing a car has been, for the most part, a terrible experience for consumers for decades. Impel’s technology platform that helps car dealers (and manufacturers) change all of that through the use of generative conversational AI. In essence, we bring the best of the showroom experience and all key dealer services directly to the consumer anytime, anywhere they desire. And our proprietary shopper and customer data ensures that every interaction is highly personalized and tailored to the needs of each consumer. First-party consumer data informs Impel AI, which then activates that data to create personalized experiences at every shopper or customer touchpoint, providing a continuity of experience that is sorely lacking in so much of automotive retail.
With Impel’s generative conversational AI, prospective buyers can get answers to any question they have about a particular vehicle through chat, email, and SMS text. From vehicle features and pricing, to trade-in and financing options, Impel AI provides answers to even the most complex inquiries – responding instantly to customers at any time of day or night. Our AII works seamlessly with dealership staff to schedule appointments, follow-up with customers, coordinate phone calls with sales reps, and even facilitate vehicle trade-ins. Impel AI is the ideal dealership employee – it answers questions promptly and completely, It never takes a break, and it works seamlessly with other team members at the dealership to deliver white glove service to every customer. In addition to helping consumers at the research and buying stages, Impel AI also helps dealers and manufacturers deliver white-glove experiences during the vehicle ownership stage. Impel AI automates the process of identifying vehicle servicing needs and reaching out to customers to answer service questions and schedule service appointments for their vehicles. Through the use of predictive analytics and sales/service history, Impel AI proactively reaches out to every customer when it’s time to remind them of service needs, maintenance requirements, state inspections, vehicle recalls and more. AI-powered automation enables dealers to activate this outreach and appointment scheduling hundreds and thousands of times a day, providing a valuable service for customers and saving countless hours for staff who are then able to focus their energy on higher-value activities.
Impel AI accomplishes all of this while providing the most personalized, human-like, nuanced and empathic conversations in the industry – so much so, that many dealers share examples of customers asking for the AI by name when making an appointment or when visiting the dealership.
With 21 billion shopper interactions and $5 billion in sales and service revenue influenced, what do you believe are the key factors behind Impel’s success in the market?
First and foremost, it’s been our people. When I referenced our core values above, I absolutely meant it – those values came from our teams and how they execute and live the Impel mission and vision day after day. We have the best people in the industry bar none. Visionary, gritty, scrappy, relentless, passionate, results-driven, inventive, customer-centric; employees who want to do what’s best for the customer and the industry and won’t take no for an answer. And we’ve deliberately recruited the best and brightest minds in auto (and outside of it!) when it comes to product development, engineering, technical support, and our commercial functions. It’s humbling and I couldn’t be more proud of each and every one of our Impel team members.
Next would be our ability and desire to understand the industry deeply and comprehensively. We work tirelessly to gain insights directly from the frontline operators themselves – dealers, online marketplaces, and OEMs – regarding the customer experience, the most critical barriers to growth, the operational pain points, and how technologies from other sectors can be reapplied and customized to meet the auto industry need. Our level of commitment, customization and support is one of the most consistent points of feedback we get from our customers.
Third is our commitment to innovation and a growth mindset. We never get complacent, we’ve continued to keep and hone our entrepreneurial mindset and urgency mentality as we’ve grown. We were first with 360 imaging technology, we established the digital merchandising category, we evolved to digital engagement and omnichannel strategy well before anyone else did, and we entered the conversational AI space with a solution purpose-built for automotive retail – well before open-source GPT was launched. That’s what keeps us ahead of the industry and drives customer loyalty.
How do you foresee the impact of AI and automation evolving in the automotive industry over the next five years?
We believe that AI-powered automation will enable an operational scale and an always-on seamless customer experience that has historically been impossible for automotive retailers to achieve. Increasingly, retailers will become AI-enabled businesses, relying less on labor-intensive processes and systems. The most successful dealers will view themselves less as car sales operators and more as customer service businesses that happen to work with cars. Customer Lifetime Value, customer retention and loyalty, and the customer experience will become the primary performance drivers, since AI will enable auto retailers to deliver a customer experience that’s personalized, engaging, and instantly responsive, at a scale impossible to replicate with human personnel.
The advancements in generative conversational AI, verticalized models, neural networks, Large Language Models, and automation technologies will mean that AI will be handling the majority of routine inquiries, most common customer issues, and repeat questions – and in many areas of the market, it already is. The development and scale of AI-enabled voice and telephony technology will accelerate as well. We’re already seeing cases across many sectors of the auto industry where the customer satisfaction scores that generative AI applications generate are on par with – and often surpass – that of human agents.
The role of the human sales and service agent will evolve as well. They will be more tech-savvy, efficient, and forward-thinking, understanding how to integrate AI-enabled technologies and applications seamlessly into their workflows to increase their productivity, level of service, and results.
Can you discuss a specific instance where Impel’s AI-powered platform significantly improved operational efficiency or customer engagement for a client?
In general, we see the following results when customers adopt and deploy AI at scale throughout their dealership operations:
- Labor and software savings of 20-40% when all costs are factored in
- An average lift in showroom appointment set rates of 25-40%, but we’ve observed increases of more than 50%
- Productivity lifts: 30-50% increases in activity metrics such as touches per lead, total outbound sales activity, and live phone calls, with corresponding decrease in manual-intensive activities like email, texting, lead tracking and updating, etc.
- On the post-purchase side, we see service appointment increases of 20-30% on average, which enable dealerships to retain more customers and improve loyalty.
- We also see service Repair Order revenue increases of $100,000 per month, on average.
Also happy to provide quotes from a few of our customers:
“Impel AI has ultimately given us a competitive edge in a challenging market by enabling us to better prioritize high-value customer engagement activities like showroom appointments and live calls. As a result, we’ve seen measurable sales growth and productivity improvements, and the results only continue to impress.” – Yama Popal, General Manager, Elk Grove Buick GMC
“Since deploying Impel AI, we’ve been able to re-engage lost customers and increase loyalty with hyper-personalized communications. The platform has allowed us to drive more service appointments, better manage the ownership experience, and scale our service operations without additional overhead. Our service reps can stay focused on helping customers and building relationships while Impel AI does all of the outreach and follow-up work. More customer loyalty means more service revenue – and also more future unit sales.” – Bryan Newton, Service Director, Fred Anderson Toyota
“Loving the volume of appointments. If Meghan (Impel AI assistant) was a person, she’d outsell all of my sales reps on the floor. Absolutely thrilled with everything so far.” – Eric Hall, General Manager, Priority Honda
“We felt that the well-rounded approach of Impel’s AI platform was the best. It really helped us to manage the customer lifecycle at scale, from the time we get the initial lead, to selling the vehicle, and then ultimately, servicing that vehicle. We’ve been able to continue to scale growth while maintaining our staffing levels, and we’ve been able to uncover more opportunities to sell and service more vehicles. It’s just an incredible solution I think every dealership needs to have.” – Christopher Legg, Marketing & Digital Performance Manager, Ourisman Ford
Impel recently made a $100M acquisition. How do you see this impacting the company’s growth and the services you provide to automotive dealerships?
At Impel, our goal is to be the de facto standard of automotive AI in the industry. The acquisition of Outsell, the industry’s leading automated customer engagement platform, is a massive milestone and a critical enabler of that objective. White their AI-powered predictive analytics and automated consumer outreach is unparalleled and essential to effective customer lifecycle management, the secret weapon is the 20 years of proprietary first-party customer behavioral data. In the past year alone, Outsell has delivered over 500 million messages via omnichannel – SMS, email, direct mail, social – to almost 70 million consumers. This represents a huge treasure trove of precedent transactional and behavioral data that can unlock transformational levels of AI activation, applications, and 1:1 personalization. Together, we’ll create the first truly end-to-end AI-powered sales and marketing automation platform for the industry, enabling dealers to finally manage the consumer lifecycle on a 1:1 basis at scale, from awareness and shopper acquisition, to web, to sales, to service and even dealership inventory acquisition.
