Launching in Q1 2026, Keyloop’s Fusion platform aims to provide a range of dealership solutions, covering both administrative workflows and the customer experience, leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to boost capabilities and efficiency. 

Following the launch of Keyloop’s AI-powered business intelligence tools VEGA and VEGA.ai, Motor Trade News speaks to Adrian Nash, chief product officer at Keyloop, to learn what this means for dealers and the customer experience.

Once the Fusion platform is fully launched in Q1 2026, what do you think will be its most powerful function? 

I think it’ll be the data insights. At the moment, it’s really challenging for businesses and our customers to get an idea of what’s happening in their network today, and what’s happening across all the different departments in their business.

Traditionally, because of legacy technology, that has been really hard to do. So, VEGA will be able to connect all those data sources, and be the companion of the CFO, the CEO, the regional managers, all of those personas, to drive real business insight, so that you can make changes in real time. 

Many people have concerns about data privacy. How does Keyloop handle data?

First, it’s not Keyloop’s data. The data that we hold is that of the dealerships. When we are looking at insights and AI, the dealership is the data controller. We don’t need customer-by-customer data, or anything like that.

So, if you’re a consumer, you’re managing your consent preferences with the dealership, and we are one of those parties that follows those guidelines from the consumer. The way that we operate is, it’s our dealership customers’ data, and we house the technology that then enables us to do things like insights, analytics, and AI. 

What would you say to someone who’s sceptical about AI, and thinks it could damage their business in the long run? 

The way that I think about the current wave that we’re on with AI is, it’s trying to give your staff superpowers. The first step won’t be about cost reduction, it’ll be about how you augment a service adviser with the knowledge of the large language model (LLM), it’ll be how you can automate things so that you don’t have to hire someone to type from one screen to another screen.  

For those that are the laggards, from an AI perspective, the challenge is that there will be other businesses out there leveraging AI, that will have better margins, a more automated process, and the ability to move faster.  

My concern for those laggards is that they will have more of a legitimate business challenge, because of the weight and the speed of the insight that others, that do use AI, will be able to use.  

AI will be best used where it augments the key personas in the dealership. You want to give your sales team superpowers, you want to give your service advisers superpowers, you want to give you technicians superpowers – so that, ultimately, you’re more efficient at delivering a customer experience. The risk if you’re a laggard is that your competition will be using that, and they will have a legitimate business advantage. 

Can dealers tailor the customer experience to fit their brand? 

You want it to be a branded dealership experience. Everything needs to be aligned to the brand – the design, the look and feel. You don’t really know that you’re using Keyloop technology if you’re a customer, but you do if you’re a business user. Everything that’s customer facing has to be truly branded.  

With some manufacturers moving to a direct sales model, could this technology accelerate that transition, and potentially make dealerships obsolete? 

The thing about the dealership model and the retailer model is that it’s better suited to some customer engagement. For example, there is the ‘used and new’ vehicle choice as you’re buying a vehicle. So, I don’t think it will be complete.

There are some manufacturers that obviously want to go direct. There is a vision that it doesn’t really matter where you buy the car from, but as a retailer you definitely want to do the servicing, the handover, and have a way to engage with the customer, even if they’re buying through an agency model.  

There could be a world where manufacturers are selling through the agency model, the handover happens inside the dealership – powered by Keyloop technology – and then, every engagement beyond that point is helped by Keyloop in the aftersales domain.  

Most people in the modern era are busy. They don’t have time to dig in to large amounts of research, or check different dealership sites to compare prices. Our smart devices will start to be like mini researchers for us. You might say: ‘I need something bigger, my family’s growing’ or ‘I need something smaller because the family have left home, I want some options.’ Personal devices will interface with technology that uses both manufacturers’ and dealers’ websites. They won’t be tied to an actual dealership, they’ll do the research.  

So, it’s a bit of a mixed picture. I don’t think there’s one true answer. Some manufacturers will go direct to consumer, because they want to build a customer 360. Those that can know the customer across the sales and aftersales process will be the ones that ultimately win in that space. 

Is there a potential for customers to treat interactions from dealership AIs like spam emails, and just ignore them? 

I personally get contacted all the time about a Mini up in Northampton, where I live, and I’ve not owned a Mini for a couple of years. If the data and engagement is irrelevant, or not accurate, people will treat it as spam.  

So, we need to find ways to make sure that the data core is more accurate, enriched, constantly updated, and connected to the customer. That will drive better, more relevant engagement with customers. It will always be opt-in, so the customers will be able to dial up or dial down the communications with the dealership, because it’s their right as data subjects. 

How long would it take for a dealership to implement the whole range of Fusion solutions? 

Each domain is slightly different. The Operate domain is like an enterprise resource planning solution (ERP). This probably takes, say, three to six months to implement. That’s more like change management in the accounting processes, as it’s quite a big fundamental DNA change inside of a dealership. Whereas the Supply, Demand and Ownership hubs are much quicker cycles. So, for example, you can theoretically be live in the Vehicle Hub within weeks.  

In Demand, with the e-commerce capabilities, again we’re talking weeks. It’s not a technology enablement, it’s more about making it branded, and things like that. So, for example, the Service Hub that we just launched actually takes 30 minutes to activate.

You can’t implement it straight away, because you have to train people. You have to get the operational capabilities to the right versions. But the vision is to have a really low time to activation for all of our cloud-native solutions.

Operate is always going to be a bit longer, because it’s an ERP system, which is fundamental to the backbones of a business, with their ledger, invoicing, accounting, and all of those pieces.

We’re driving towards new solutions being really quick. The change management is still the biggest impediment to go live in many of those solutions. 

Beyond current technical limitations, what would you like to implement in Fusion in the future? 

There’s a real opportunity for insight. We talk a lot about the customer experience, and how we can connect that together to mirror what we would expect from a high-fashion retailer, for example. That’s a relatively clear vision.

With automotive, we have a lot to do to get there. But the thing about automotive is, they operate on such small margins that any improvements to the customer experience, and anything to make the back-office processes more efficient, the margins will improve.  

If you are operating on a 1% to 2% margin, versus a software company that might be 10% to 15%, every percentage point or even incremental improvement is a legitimate impact on your business.  

The problem in the past was, there were things like Robotic Process Automation – open this screen, click A, click B, click C – but they’re really fragile, because if they find something they don’t understand, it can just stop. But with AI, you can take some contextual decisions and continue the process. The biggest opportunity in automotive is to just make the back-offices so much more efficient, connecting to manufacturer systems, with resilience, so that they’re not flaky integration patterns, they’re self-healing integration agents.