By Michael Collins, Managing Principal, EquiNova

It’s not just an alphabetical coincidence that advocates of AI (artificial intelligence) quickly segue into talking about BI (business intelligence). BI is billed as the profit-making reward you’ll get from investing in systems that make you better aware of, and smarter about, all the things happening in your and your competitors’ companies. Who wouldn’t pay money for that?

The BI part of AI empowers dealers to sort through the mountains of data collected in their ERP systems and other sources, and then present results whenever and however the user wants to look at it. The payoff comes when the user learns something profitable and unexpected–as unexpectedly lucrative, hopefully, as the legendary discovery decades ago that late-night male shoppers on a run for baby diapers often bought beer, too.

BI can be a great vehicle, but it requires a thoughtful and attentive chauffeur. That will be a problem at many dealers, because the executives most likely to need this business intelligence lack the staff and/or personal time needed to organize and analyze the reports that AI generates. Some will get around this by hiring new people to parse the numbers. Others will hand AI programs over to already overburdened existing staff or executives, and end up getting little to no benefit from their investment.

This lack-of-time issue is an old problem that plagues dealers even in humdrum times. There are so many day-to-day tasks that there’s never time to invest in potentially rewarding tasks like improving business intelligence.

The solution is just as old as the problem. The only way for an executive to succeed is to spend less time working IN the business and more time working ON the business. There has to be a difference in staffing between people who run the operation today and people who focus on how to improve the operation tomorrow. You see this at work every time an organization chart lists both a chief executive and a chief operating officer.

Investors understand this. Along with a great track record of top- and bottom-line growth, they value leadership teams that can work on and in a business simultaneously. As AI makes vast new amounts of data available for review, investors will be looking to see how fluent and fast leaders are in reading and responding to that data. The only way that can happen is for the organization to have leaders who can operate outside the daily churn and exploit the BI that AI provides.