As we get ready to welcome the automotive industry to Digital Dealer 2026 this September, we wanted to take some time to spotlight some of the exhibitors that attendees will have the opportunity to meet with in Detroit. Today, we had the pleasure of talking with inride about their agentic AI, how users have already benefited from the platform and why they’re looking forward to DDCE26.
Digital Dealer: Can you provide an overview of inride, your core offerings and what you do?
inride builds autonomous AI agents for automotive retail. Our flagship product, Trade Agent AI, is a used vehicle acquisition engine that works inside a dealership’s existing customer database — no new traffic, no third-party leads. It identifies past buyers who are statistically ready to upgrade, reaches out to them via personalized SMS and email through an AI agent that takes on whatever name and persona the dealer chooses, handles objections in real conversations, generates live appraisals, and books qualified trade-in appointments — 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with zero BDC involvement. We integrate with all major CRM and DMS platforms and can typically have a dealer live within a week of receiving their data.
Digital Dealer: Why is a platform like inride’s important for dealers and how are automotive dealerships best leveraging it?
The used vehicle margin story right now is brutal. Dealers are auction-dependent, and auction units average around $1,500 in front-end gross compared to roughly $5,000 on a trade-in. Meanwhile, CarMax, Carvana, and competing dealers are actively contacting your past customers with trade offers — often before you do.
The opportunity sitting untouched in most dealerships is their own database. On average, 15–30% of past buyers are statistically ready to upgrade in any given month — they just haven’t been asked in a meaningful way. A blast text or a generic email campaign isn’t going to move them. What does move them is a real conversation with an AI agent that knows their vehicle, understands their situation, handles their objections intelligently, and — when the timing is right — books the appointment.
The dealers getting the most out of Trade Agent AI are the ones who’ve stopped treating their customer database as a marketing list and started treating it as a live acquisition pipeline. They run the agent continuously, not as a one-time push, so it’s always working — responding to market signals, re-engaging customers who weren’t ready six months ago, and feeding the used lot with direct-from-consumer inventory that doesn’t come with an auction fee attached.
Digital Dealer: What are some examples of how you’ve helped users, both sellers and dealers?
Our best documented results come from a three-rooftop dealer group — Ford, Lincoln, and Mazda — that ran Trade Agent AI over a three-month period. Across those rooftops, the platform generated 53 closed deals and $190,633 in combined gross profit, at an average ROI of 607%. The Lincoln store alone delivered a 764% ROI.
On the operations side, GMs tell us what they value most is the lack of lift. Their BDC isn’t managing new inbound volume. Their salespeople receive appointment-ready leads, not cold prospects to chase. The AI runs the entire conversation — the desk only sees a warm customer with full context already in hand.
For the customer, the experience is genuinely different from anything they’ve received before. The AI agent reaches out with real awareness of their situation: the specific vehicle they’re in, how long they’ve owned it, how it’s positioned in the current market. And it doesn’t follow a script. It reads the conversation, handles objections with empathy and humor where appropriate, and adapts in real time. Customers respond because it doesn’t feel like an automated text. It feels like a call from someone at the dealership who actually did their homework.
Digital Dealer: Looking at current trends, where do you see the biggest opportunities for growth in the automotive sector in 2026 and beyond?
The single biggest opportunity — and it’s been hiding in plain sight — is used vehicle acquisition outside of auctions and traditional sourcing channels. Margins on auction units have compressed to the point where dealers are grinding for $1,500 in front-end gross on inventory that costs them $1,500+ to acquire and recondition before it hits the lot. Meanwhile, a trade sourced directly from their own customer base averages closer to $5,000 in front-end gross. That math is why we exist, and we think it represents one of the most significant structural shifts in how successful used departments will operate going forward.
Beyond acquisition economics, we’re watching OEM co-op alignment as a major signal of where the industry is heading. We were the first agentic AI platform in automotive to receive Ford co-op approval — and what that really means is that for the first time, one of the Big Three has formally treated an autonomous AI agent the way it treats a billboard or a radio spot: a recognized, reimbursable line item in a dealer’s marketing budget. That’s not a minor footnote. That’s the OEM ecosystem acknowledging that autonomous AI belongs in the same conversation as traditional media spend.
We’re proud to have led the way on that, and we’re happy to keep leading. As more OEMs follow Ford’s model and open co-op programs to agentic AI, the adoption curve for this category accelerates — and the dealers who are already running it have a meaningful head start.
Digital Dealer: Can you highlight any recent innovations or strategies that set your company apart in the market?
What sets us apart comes down to one word: we acquire.
A lot of the technology dealers use today stops short of the finish line — it identifies opportunities, sends a message, then waits on a person to follow through. Trade Agent AI runs the entire acquisition workflow autonomously: it analyzes your database, reaches out to past buyers like a trained salesperson, handles objections in real conversations 24/7, and hands your team appointment-ready leads with full context.
A few recent innovations driving that:
Multi-criteria predictive scoring. We score every customer across vehicle age, mileage trajectory, service history, ownership tenure, equity position, market conditions, and behavioral signals — giving a full-context read on who’s genuinely ready to upgrade, not just who has positive equity on paper.
A perpetual lifecycle engine. Rather than a single campaign that runs and stops, we work each contact through evolving cadences — initial outreach, re-engagement, long nurture, seasonal reactivation — for months and years, autonomously. A customer who isn’t ready today gets worked intelligently until they are.
Market-triggered outreach. The system reacts to real-world signals, not just a calendar. If a customer’s vehicle spikes in market value, or a dealer says, “I need 2019–2021 RAV4s,” it identifies matching customers and launches targeted outreach automatically.
Underpinning all of it is our DMS connector — Trade Agent AI F&I — which performs nightly delta syncs against a dealer’s full RO history, sales records, and finance data. That’s the data layer that makes the scoring meaningful. And the architecture behind it is patent-pending, because we filed on the agentic AI system that ties it all together — and it’s getting more capable every month.
Digital Dealer: What are you most excited about while exhibiting at Digital Dealer this year?
There’s a lot of technology being rushed into automotive right now — vendors deploying AI just to say they have it, without the results to back it up. What we’re excited to show at Digital Dealer is what proven looks like. Trade Agent AI has real dealers, real rooftops, real closed deals, and real gross profit numbers to point to. We’ve earned OEM co-op approval from Ford — something no other agentic AI platform in this industry has done — because we went through the scrutiny that requires.
Digital Dealer attracts operators who are past the “is AI hype or real?” phase. They want to see what’s actually working in automotive retail — not a concept demo, not a beta, but a system that’s live in dealerships today, booking appointments and generating gross. That’s exactly what we’ll be showing. We’re excited to have those conversations with the GMs, principals, and used car directors who are ready to put real technology to work.
Digital Dealer: Why should attendees stop by your booth?
If you’re a dealer running 150+ units a month and you’re buying more than 30% of your used inventory at auction, we should talk. We’ll show you — live, against your actual rooftop — how many trades are sitting dormant in your customer database right now, what they’d be worth in gross, and what it takes to activate them autonomously. No pitch decks, no vendor demos. Just your data, our model, and a real number. Come find us.
inride will be at Digital Dealer, September 22-23, 2026, at Booth #553
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