Frequently asked questions

AI for car dealerships is software that handles real customer conversations on a dealership's behalf — answering inbound calls, texts, and web chats, booking service appointments, following up on sales leads, and writing every interaction back into the DMS and CRM. Unlike a website chatbot, dealership AI works across the phone lines and every messaging channel your customers actually use, 24/7.

Alpha Drive AI goes a step further than answering questions: it executes the operational workflow behind them. When a customer calls about a recall, Alpha verifies the vehicle, checks real scheduler availability, books the appointment, assigns the right op-code, and logs the RO — no advisor required. That distinction matters, because a car dealership AI that only talks still leaves the work on your team. That's also why Alpha pairs the AI with live agents through Live Assist — some conversations, and outbound compliance, require people.

Alpha Drive AI is AI + live agents for car dealerships. We power voice, text, web chat, and email for dealerships — Sales, Service, Parts, F&I, BDC, and Reception — 24/7, with no missed interactions. Every lead captured, every service call answered, every appointment booked. It is delivered as four products — IVR Pro, Inbound Pro, Outbound Pro, and Live Assist — each in Sales and Service variants. And because true omnichannel includes people, Live Assist puts trained live agents on the same team as the AI — for overflow, transfers, and outbound outreach.

Only if you want it to. Alpha connects to your service advisors and salespeople as well as any dealership AI does: transfers by phone, Teams, Slack, email or the Alpha Drive app, with the transcript attached. Keep your BDC and Alpha runs in front of it. Or retire the internal BDC entirely, because Alpha is the only option in the category that also supplies the people: AI handles volume, Live Assist agents handle escalations, relationships and human outbound.

AI-only vendors still require an internal dealership BDC behind them. Alpha Drive is the only one that erases that need, from the company that has operated dealership BDCs since 1993.

Yes, with the right consent and disclosure. The FCC treats AI-generated voice as an artificial voice under the TCPA: informational calls need prior express consent, marketing calls need prior express written consent, and a growing number of states require an AI disclosure at the start of the call.

Alpha Drive splits outbound accordingly. Outbound Pro handles consented, transactional outreach such as recalls, declined service, due-service reminders and appointment confirmations, with identification and AI disclosure on every call and consent logged against each contact. Live Assist agents handle promotional, sales-event and conquest outreach, where a person is the right choice. Your store gets the full outbound BDC with the risk managed by design.

Alpha runs inbound and outbound customer conversations across every department: Sales BDC, Service BDC, the service drive, Parts, F&I follow-up, Reception and main-line IVR, recall outreach, declined-service win-back, equity mining, post-visit surveys, and more. Everything is delivered through four products — IVR Pro (intelligent routing), Inbound Pro (AI Sales and Service BDC), Outbound Pro (transactional outreach), and Live Assist (live agents) — each purpose-built on 30+ years of dealership BDC operational expertise.

Our proprietary Secure Cascading LLM routes each customer interaction across frontier models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google — selecting the optimal model for speed, accuracy, and cost. Simple inquiries are handled by fast, efficient models; complex, multi-step workflows like VIN-level service history, warranty lookups, or F&I questions escalate to more powerful models — all in real time, invisible to the customer.

Your customer data is never used to train any underlying model and never leaves our trust boundary.

Alpha Drive AI is fully omnichannel: Voice AI (inbound and outbound calls), SMS AI, Chat AI (web and in-app), and Email AI (recall campaigns, declined-service follow-ups, post-service CSI, review recovery). All four channels share the same customer record, conversation history, and DMS context — so the experience is seamless no matter how the customer reaches out.

Alpha plugs natively into the full automotive tech stack: CDK Global, Reynolds & Reynolds, Tekion, Dealertrack, PBS, and Autosoft on the DMS side; VinSolutions, Elead, DealerSocket, and ProMax on CRM; Xtime, myKaarma, and Tekion Service for scheduling; Dealer.com, Dealer Inspire, and DealerOn on websites and chat; and Microsoft Teams, Slack, Gmail, and Outlook for internal routing and handoffs.

Through our MCP integration layer, Alpha connects to 3,000+ additional apps and services — giving you virtually unlimited connectivity with whatever else your group runs on.

No. Alpha Drive AI does not use AI Proxy. We built our own secure AI infrastructure from the ground up — every model call, every integration, and every piece of customer data flows through systems we own and operate. That means no third-party middleman touching your customer conversations, no opaque routing, and no data leaving the Alpha Drive trust boundary.

Alpha is a full operating platform — not a chatbot bolted onto your website. Four things set us apart: 30+ years of running automotive BDCs through our parent company Dealer's Greatest Assets; a Secure Cascading LLM architecture that spans Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google rather than betting on one model; the deepest integration surface in automotive retail, with 3,000+ MCP connectors into your DMS, CRM, scheduler, and comms tools; and Live Assist, trained live agents on the same team as the AI. Every dealership AI can route calls to your advisors and salespeople, and Alpha does that as well as any of them. The difference is that AI-only vendors still require an internal dealership BDC behind them; Alpha Drive is the only option that can erase that need entirely, and the only one whose people make human outbound calls.

No engineering required on your end. Alpha is a fully managed platform — our team custom-builds every AI agent to match your dealership's brand voice, hours, service-drive protocols, F&I language, inventory rules, and OEM requirements. Each deployment is tailored rooftop by rooftop, not a template drop.

Yes. On the customer-facing side, Alpha handles every inbound and outbound conversation across voice, text, chat, and email — sales inquiries, service scheduling, recall outreach, appointment reminders, F&I follow-ups, declined-service win-backs, and more.

Internally, Alpha automates the operational side: routing sales leads to the right advisor, alerting service managers of high-value opportunities, pushing human handoffs to Teams, Slack, email, or the Alpha app, and writing every outcome back to your DMS. One platform covers every customer touch and every downstream workflow.

Absolutely. Alpha is built for dealer groups from day one: multi-rooftop routing, a centralized Command Center, group-level reporting and revenue attribution, rooftop-specific knowledge bases, and role-based access for GMs, BDC managers, and operators. We currently run 500+ active rooftops.

When a customer request exceeds what Alpha can confidently handle — or a customer simply prefers a person — Alpha transfers to a trained Live Assist agent or pushes the conversation, with full context, to your team via Microsoft Teams, Slack, email, or the Alpha Drive app. No dead ends. Every conversation is tracked, searchable, and written back to your DMS.

Alpha Drive AI operates under SOC 2, TCPA, CASL, GDPR, and CCPA controls. Your customer data stays inside Alpha's trust boundary — it is never shared with third parties, never used to train external models, and never routed through an external AI proxy. Full audit logs, role-based access, and configurable retention policies are available at the dealer-group level.

Book a 20-minute demo. We'll show you a live conversation against your own scenario — and calculate your ROI against your last month of phone data. From there, our team segments every dealer flow — Sales, Service, Parts, F&I, BDC, Reception — and builds the advanced routing, handoff, and DMS write-back logic specific to your store. It's a collaborative onboarding, not a plug-and-play switch: we take the time to get each flow right so Alpha runs your dealership the way your dealership actually runs.