Pre-Header: Inside Reynolds’ AI Strategy

Subject:  Interview with Chris Walsh – an almost 4-decade industry veteran!

Dealer Software Success sat down with Chris Walsh, President and Acting CEO of The Reynolds and Reynolds Company, for a conversation covering his many-year run at the company, the strategy behind Spark AI and the “It’s a Faster Tuesday” tagline, and where Reynolds is headed over the next five years.

Many Years In, and What’s Actually Changed
Walsh started at Reynolds on the service side, back when the solutions were straightforward: accounting, parts and service. “You knew the specific people to call on for sales and who to support,” he said. Today, hundreds of solutions target dealers for every part of their operation, some covering the whole store, others built for a single task. The complexity isn’t from the dealership business itself changing — it’s from the many ways customers now expect to transact, in person, online, or some mix of both. What hasn’t moved, Walsh said, is Reynolds’ commitment to putting people in the field, in person, to help dealerships make good decisions.

No Standard Pitch

You’ve probably heard the “It’s a Faster Tuesday” line but it isn’t just a script. Reynolds has roughly 300 team members in the field who have to know the business, the applications, and how to match both to a specific store’s needs. Training has gotten more intensive over the years, with substantial investment in cycling team members through Reynolds’ Dayton headquarters for continuous education. Walsh was direct about the approach:  the dealership-facing team is expected to understand the issues at each store, challenge dealers on their assumptions, and land on the advice that actually fits.

AI That Scales With the Store

Whether a store sells 50 units a month or 500, or is part of a regional or national group, Walsh said Reynolds’ goal is to be a trusted advisor at every size. The solutions are built to be scalable and customizable, so any dealership can pick the technology stack it needs and still benefit from Spark AI. Reynolds also offers DMS-agnostic single solutions that are often the first thing a location signs up for — Gubagoo is one example. To underline that scalability, Reynolds acquired its Powersports division a couple of years ago specifically to extend DMS and other solutions to dealers of every size.

The ROI Timeline

Every implementation is somewhat unique to the location, but Walsh suggested that a Reynolds customer adding AI features may see results faster than a customer converting from another system. The reason isn’t the technology — it’s the goals. An existing customer usually has a few specific outcomes in mind, while a converting customer often arrives with a much broader set of needs. Reynolds works with every customer to define goals and timetables up front, and ROI gets measured against those targets. The single biggest factor in how fast that ROI shows up, is focus — isolating which parts of the dealership need attention first.

Where Reynolds Goes From Here

Several years ago, Reynolds began unifying data across its DMS, so that a customer showing up anywhere in the vehicle or customer lifecycle — in any part of the dealership — would already be known to whoever was helping them. That decision, Walsh said, is what positioned Reynolds ahead of the AI wave. Over the next five years, he expects AI to keep taking on repetitive tasks and to get more proactive about recognizing what a customer or prospect has or hasn’t done, acting independently where it can. The goal is an AI agent that works for the store’s team members, freeing them up for higher-level work — without losing the person-to-person touch that Walsh sees as core to how the franchise system evolves.

Start With the Low-Hanging Fruit

Asked what a dealer principal could do this month to get more from the AI tools they already have, Walsh’s advice was to keep it small. Every dealer or manager has a few repetitive tasks or bottlenecks in mind — pick a few, sit down with a trusted advisor, and solve that low-hanging fruit with an AI-assisted solution. A quick win, he said, tends to generate more ideas for what’s next, rather than getting stuck trying to plan the whole path at once.

Check where your software vendors stand at dealer-software-success.com/dealership-ai-provider-rankings/.

— Gerry

Subscribe to Newsletters