Reynolds and Reynolds is hosting its Retail Summit this week, with artificial intelligence being the focal point of many event activities.

The highlight was the launch of Spark AI, an artificial intelligence data layer that now powers all Reynolds AI products.

The company explained Spark AI can eliminate silos created by AI tools and provide a broader data set, resulting in smarter tools.

The company is leveraging AI and machine learning to help the automotive retail industry make “tremendous leaps forward.”

Unveiled at the Reynolds Retail Summit, four AI products that leverage the single, shared Spark AI data layer were released to deliver smarter, outcome-driven results, including:

—Conversation AI: Sales managers can have hot cases from phone calls served up to them automatically. They no longer have to review every call one by one to uncover coaching opportunities, upset customers, or those ready to buy. Conversation AI automatically transcribes each call, summarizes it, and tags it with a category directly in the CRM, simplifying phone call follow-up and conversion.

—Engagement AI: Chasing down non-responsive leads can be extremely frustrating and time consuming. Engagement AI can augment that task for salespeople through conversational text messages with prospects as leads come into the dealership. Engagement AI can prioritize high-value leads when it identifies customers ready to buy, and then connects them with staff directly via instant notifications.

—Prospect AI: The tool can identify customers with a high propensity to buy and matches them with vehicles that best fit their situation in the dealership’s inventory. It also goes a step further to determine how they will buy — finance, lease, or cash. The Spark AI data layer can leverage phases of life, major events and a host of other factors and variables to make these determinations.

—Merchandising AI: Compelling vehicle descriptions and professional-looking photos are major factors in online conversions, but they can take a tremendous amount of time and resources. Merchandising AI can eliminate guesswork, manual creation, and copy-and-paste entries by creating high-quality descriptions with key vehicle features pulled directly from the VIN. It also updates image backgrounds to remove distractions and automatically places overlays on images for consistency.

“Artificial intelligence and machine learning tools are just beginning to come into their own,” Reynolds president Chris Walsh said in a news release. “As a result, some still struggle to get disparate applications to coordinate and function together as a whole to get the most benefit out of AI across their systems.

“At Reynolds, we have long approached designing our products to work seamlessly with each other,” Walsh continued. “This forward-thinking approach has made it possible to implement widespread AI benefits across our entire Retail Management System, enabling dealers to maximize productivity, strengthen customer interactions, and make more educated decisions.”

To maximize the impact of Merchandising AI, Reynolds also announced at its Retail Summit the merging of ReconTRAC and AutoVision.

ReconTRAC has been renamed ReconVision and is now a part of the AutoVision platform.

Walsh said this change will bring all vehicle management tools together in one platform and further broaden the Spark AI data layer.

“Spark AI helps dealers solve many of the problems they face on a daily basis,” Walsh said. “Right now, dealerships are experiencing staffing shortages and expectations of doing as well, if not better, than they ever have before. Spark AI helps them do this by making their people more efficient and productive. It is ushering in a new way to leverage AI in automotive retail.”