Car Dealerships Are Replacing Phone Staff With AI Voice Agents

The next time you call a car dealership, the voice on the other end may not belong to a human.

As TechCrunch reports, the founders of Toma, an AI voice agent startup, pivoted from pitching to healthcare and finance companies to fielding calls from automotive salespeople desperate to offload some of their labor to AI agents.

To hone their product, founders Monik Pamecha and Anthony Krivonos visited a dozen dealerships in the states of Oklahoma and Mississippi — no word on why they chose those specific locales — to get up close and personal with potential clients.

Along with racking up folksy anecdotes about being fed home-cooked dinners and getting car grease on their clothes, TechCrunch reports that the learnings from the tour ended up attracting $17 million during its Andreessen Horowitz-led fundraising round for its software, which handles customer sales calls, schedules repair appointments, and takes parts orders.

“We invest in a lot of the next-generation of vertical AI companies, a lot of the best founders have just lived and breathed with these customers to understand what’s going on under the hood,” a16z partner Seema Amble told the site. “No pun intended.”

Described by the venture capital firm as a “fully integrated, AI-powered software suite designed to help dealerships operate more efficiently,” Toma’s product offering differs from the countless AI voice agent startups cropping up primarily because of its automotive focus.

The company has some competition. According to a study commissioned last year by Fullpath, a sales data platform, 80 percent of the 200 dealerships contacted said they were already using AI — and fully 100 percent of those who use the technology said they saw increasing revenues after doing so.

Notably, that study didn’t break down how those dealerships were using AI, and Toma appears to be filling a specific hole that call centers across the world have already sought to plug: replacing human agents with AI.

Yossi Levi, an automotive influencer who runs the “Car Dealership Guy” website — and who also invested in Toma — suggested that AI voice agents may be better equipped to handle the “ebbs and flows” of call volumes.

“Sometimes you’re overwhelmed with demand,” Levi told TechCrunch. “Other times there’s not enough demand, and matching staffing and properly training that staff for a consistent experience is just not an easy thing to do.”

The dealership dude insisted that Toma helps car dealers “standardize that process, and deliver a richer customer experience that is consistent.” We can’t say for sure how speaking to an AI affects the satisfaction of the customers on the other line — or whether its product has the same propensity for getting it wrong as other AI agents.

A cautionary tale for anyone rolling it out, though: remember the Chevy dealership that deployed an AI, only to become alarmed when a customer talked it into selling new vehicle for just $1?

More on agentic AI: Professors Staffed a Fake Company Entirely With AI Agents, and You’ll Never Guess What Happened