Issue No. 5 | May 5, 2026

Intelligence for F&I agents, administrators, and dealership finance professionals.

THE VEHICLE MARKET NUMBER: 27%

That is the increase in showroom appointment rates among franchised dealers using AI-driven intent scoring, per Colonnade Advisors’ DealerTech M&A Landscape report (March 2026). The floor traffic arriving at F&I desks in AI-enabled stores is not random. It is pre-scored, pre-qualified, and increasingly booked through AI-assisted workflows before meaningful salesperson interaction. The same workflow producing 26% higher lead-to-sale conversion is also changing what the customer knows, what they expect, and how much of the sales conversation has already happened before the F&I handoff.

The automotive AI market is growing from $1.4 billion in 2023 to $7.75 billion by 2030. Private equity captured 87% of auto retail M&A activity in 2025. The deals are concentrated in platforms with proprietary dealer data networks, deep DMS integration, and genuine workflow ownership. The infrastructure around the F&I desk is being rebuilt by people who have already done the math on what it produces.

THE F&I ANGLE

At the Agent Summit on April 15, a panel moderated by Brian Reed of Automotive Ventures laid out specific predictions for 2028. Agentic bots will operate alongside sales teams in real time, providing value as conversations happen. Some dealer groups will go fully agentic with no human interaction at all. Organizations will be smaller and the nature of work will change. And by 2028, every conversation in the dealership will be recorded across the sales floor, phone, text, email, and the F&I office. That data will be used for real training, coaching, and compliance using AI.

The M&A activity in 2024 and 2025 makes that prediction concrete. Warburg Pincus invested in myKaarma, an AI-enabled fixed ops platform, in January 2026. Francisco Partners acquired OEConnection, an AI aftersales tech platform, in November 2025. Woven Capital led a $191 million Series D into UVeye, an automated vehicle inspection company with $380.5 million in total funding, in January 2025. These are not exploratory investments. They are bets on owning the workflow, not assisting it.

Dealerships currently miss an estimated 30 to 40 percent of inbound calls. AI voice agents are replacing legacy BDC infrastructure at a fraction of the cost, with response latency customers cannot distinguish from a live rep. Fixed ops deployments are generating 15 to 20 percent service revenue increases through predictive outreach. The activity in front of F&I is being engineered upstream. The desk that has not adjusted its conversation flow to an AI-qualified buyer is working with assumptions that no longer describe who is sitting across from them.

FROM THE BLOG

DealerTech AI in Warranty Claims: From Processing to Decision Systems

This week’s post covers the AI capability categories reshaping automotive retail, including buyer intent, communications systems, and fixed operations intelligence, alongside the private equity deal flow behind those platforms.

THE DESK STAT

87%. That is the share of auto retail M&A activity captured by private equity in 2025, per Colonnade Advisors. The companies being acquired are the platforms your DMS talks to, your BDC runs on, and your warranty claims move through. When the infrastructure around your desk changes hands, the terms of the relationship change with it. Which platforms in your current stack were acquired in the last 18 months?

Until next Tuesday —

If the shift toward AI-qualified buyers is changing how you think about your F&I process, reply here. We can walk through how those changes show up across product performance and cancellation timing.