Austin, Texas is a city at the center of transformation. In the first week of April, 2022, we brought together about 100 of our partners and peers at dealerships, dealer groups, OEMs and other technology companies to be inspired about the change happening today in the automotive industry. We think Austin is the perfect backdrop for conversations about change and opportunity, and we are so grateful to all who made the trip — thank you.
For those who couldn’t join us for Dealerware’s first INSPIRE Summit, you missed powerful talks from experts like J.D Powers’ Thomas King, President of Data & Analytics Division; and Chris Sutton, VP of Automotive Retail.
You missed insightful discussions among panels of auto industry leaders and innovators.
And of course, you missed out on great tacos and good times.
Don’t feel too bad! We’ll recap some of the week’s highlights here, and recordings of many of our panel discussions and keynote talks will be available for viewing in coming weeks.
The main stage
Dealerware’s INSPIRE Summit kicked off with an introductory talk from our CEO, Matt Carpenter, who outlined four major themes around which the week’s content and conversations would focus:
Transformation. Choice. Value. Time.
You’ll have to wait for the recording for Carpenter’s full comments on these pillars. However, the INSPIRE audience walked away knowing that encompassing transformation isn’t ahead for the auto industry. It’s already happened. And as the industry accelerates the transformational changes made in the last two, three, five years, we’re delivering new value to people that depend on us.
Increasingly, we’re learning that we often do that better through collaboration than competition. Chris Taylor, Vice President and General Manager at CDK Global, championed “Data collaboration for the win!” in a keynote talk he gave during INSPIRE.
Again pointing to Austin, Texas as a metaphor for change elsewhere, Taylor laid out his argument that access to data will determine not just which companies will win out amid change, but which business models will, too.
As INSPIRE’s two days of panel discussions unfolded, it became clear that experiments are under way with plenty of business models, too.
Panels & presentations
INSPIRE Summit is meant to put into action the type of collaborative thinking Taylor celebrated in his keynote. To empower that, we put together panel discussions aimed at bringing in multiple viewpoints on the most critical questions in our industry.
Is there a real opportunity in “new mobility” plays? How do you measure fleet ROI, and how is that math changing? How are you approaching partnerships today, and what’s the impact?
All of these were central questions examined in panel sessions. In all, there were seven panel sessions, with other topics including data-driven decision making, building loyalty with customers, exploring daily rental, and more.
Panel recordings will be among the first content available for rewatching on Dealerware’s YouTube channel. Be sure to subscribe here.
Finally, though we didn’t want to make Dealerware itself a central focus of INSPIRE Summit, two of our presentations did focus on our work with dealerships, dealer groups and OEMs.
In “Your Team Uses Dealerware — Should You?,” we walked audience members through the basics of implementing Dealerware, then staged a race to demonstrate how easy contracting with Dealerware really is.
One of our implementation specialists managed to beat one of Dealerware’s information videos through the process of creating a customer and starting a contract!
Finally, in “UX Design and Why it Matters at Your Dealership,” some of Dealerware’s product research and design team members educated the audience on design thinking and how we use it to understand the ways Dealerware is used in the real world. Then, the duo taught the audience ways to put design thinking to work for their own business.
Don’t miss out again
So, what’d you miss? Well, a few hundred words isn’t enough to capture it all, and though we’ll have hours of video content ready for you soon, that won’t quite show you all you missed either.
When invites go out next time, don’t miss your chance to join in the collaborative conversations that might INSPIRE you to explore new ideas about your business, your customers and how you move them.
