Armchair Marketing Podcast - joining the Keyloop family

The Armchair Show sat down with Tom Kilroy, CEO of Keyloop, and Gerard Thatcher, CEO of Motortech AI, to discuss one of the most significant acquisitions in automotive retail tech — and what it means for dealers navigating AI adoption.

Is Your Dealership Ready for the AI Revolution in Customer Communication? 

Keyloop has acquired Motortech AI, bringing its conversational AI agent AIME into Keyloop's Fusion automotive retail platform. It's a deal that signals something bigger than a business transaction: it marks the moment AI-powered customer communication moves from "interesting experiment" to mainstream expectation in automotive retail.

So what does it mean for dealers? And why should you care right now?

Why now is the moment for AI in automotive retail

Dealers have watched AI creep into other industries for years. But according to both CEOs, the tipping point for automotive retail has arrived — for two key reasons.

First, customers are already comfortable with it. People have shifted from typing queries into search engines to asking questions of AI tools as part of their daily routine. That behavioural change does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to adoption.

Second, and more urgently — if you're not using it, you risk being left behind. Customers can already buy clothes, book holidays and manage their finances entirely online. The expectation that car buying should be just as accessible and frictionless is no longer a future trend. It's here.

As Gerard Thatcher put it: "Consumers now expect this. Being able to buy a car and have access to all the information you need hasn't been available — and so that gap needs to close."

The problem AIME was built to solve

Gerard Thatcher didn't just build Amy from a tech background. He built it as a dealer, from inside his own showroom, where he was experiencing the same frustrations dealers face every day: missed leads, staff stretched thin, customers unable to get answers outside of working hours, and an impossible volume of simultaneous conversations to manage.

Three and a half years ago, with the emergence of large language models, he saw the opportunity to create what he describes as "the very best salesperson or assistant I could build" — one that could handle unlimited conversations at once, never sleep, and never miss a follow-up.

The first attempts didn't work. Hallucination — AI generating inaccurate or made-up responses — was a critical problem for a customer-facing tool. So the team rebuilt it with guardrails designed to eliminate that risk entirely. The result is an AI agent that dealerships can genuinely trust to speak to their customers.

What AIME can do for your dealership today?

AIME is already handling the kind of tasks that eat up your team's time without requiring their expertise.

Stock queries — the most-asked question on any dealer website is "is this car still available?" AIME connects live to AutoTrader data and Keyloop's Vehicle Hub, so the answer is always accurate and instant.

Lead qualification and follow-up — rather than your sales team calling through a list of cold leads at 9am (often to people who can't talk), AIME engages customers on their terms, qualifies interest, and distributes leads directly into your sales pipeline.

Test drive and callback booking — handled automatically, without staff involvement.

Aftersales follow-up — coming later in 2026, AIME will reach out personally to customers when their service is due, via WhatsApp, email, or their preferred channel. Not a blanket marketing email — a personalised, conversational nudge that feels nothing like being upsold.

Continued conversations — AIME retains the full conversation history on a customer's device. A customer who asked about a car four weeks ago and comes back today picks up exactly where they left off.

The numbers that matter

Dealers already running AIME are reporting:

• £18 returned for every £1 spent
• 150 staff hours saved across 90 days — time that would otherwise be spent manually following up leads
• 58% of Amy interactions now happen during working hours — meaning customers are choosing to communicate with Amy over waiting for a call, even when your team is available

That last figure surprised even the Motortech AI team. They expected the majority of usage to happen outside business hours. What it actually reveals is that customers are actively preferring this channel — not just using it as a last resort.

Freeing your team to do what they do best

One of the most common concerns about AI is job displacement. Both Tom and Gerard were clear: that's not what this is.

Salespeople are good at building relationships. They're good at reading a customer, understanding what they actually want, and guiding them to the right decision. What they're less suited to — and what takes up a disproportionate amount of their day — is answering the same stock availability question for the fortieth time, or chasing leads that never pick up the phone.

AIME handles the repetitive, data-heavy work. Your team handles the relationship. The result is that customers get faster, more accurate information AND better human attention when it counts. Both sides of that transaction win.

The AIME difference: not a chatbot

If your experience of AI in automotive has been frustrating — scripted chatbots that loop endlessly, can't answer basic questions, and push you towards a human within three messages — AIME is a different proposition.

Customers start conversations with AIME with scepticism, and end them leaving five-star Google reviews as though they'd spoken to a member of your team. Some don't realise they've spoken to an AI at all.

There's also a less obvious benefit: people ask AIME things they'd feel embarrassed to ask a salesperson. Finance jargon, basic questions about how car ownership works, things they feel they "should already know." With AIME, there's no judgement, no awkwardness, and no limit to how many follow-up questions they can ask. That openness translates directly into better-informed customers and smoother sales conversations.

How to start — without the risk

Neither CEO recommends going all-in immediately. AIME is modular by design — you can start with the basics (stock queries, test drive bookings, callback requests) and unlock additional capabilities as your confidence grows.

Think of it like onboarding a new team member. You wouldn't hand a new starter the keys to everything on day one. You'd give them a defined role, build trust, then expand their responsibilities over time.

Tom Kilroy's advice: "Try a pilot. Draw a box around it. See what happens."

Dealers who've taken that approach have consistently expanded their use of AIME once they've seen it in action — because once customers experience it, they want the full journey.

What's coming next

With AIME now integrated into Keyloop's Fusion platform — and access to data across 25,000 rooftops — the roadmap ahead is significant. Later this year: expansion to cover all inbound enquiry sources and full aftersales capability. Beyond that: retention offers timed to your customer's ownership cycle, part-exchange valuations, and a single AI agent that accompanies a customer through every stage of vehicle ownership, from first enquiry to next purchase.

The vision, as Gerard put it, is simple: AIME is there from the moment someone starts thinking about a car — and stays with them for the lifetime of their ownership.