So, you say you're tired of pushy car salespeople pouncing on you the moment you walk through the showroom door?
I tell you what I'm gonna do...
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Kia and Fiat are flooring the virtual pedal and taking the car-buying experience into the metaverse.
Both companies are using ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched in November.
Yes, there are some of you out there who scoff at the metaverse as another techno fad, but consulting firm McKinsey has a different point of view.
“The metaverse has the potential to impact everything from employee engagement to the customer experience, omnichannel sales and marketing, product innovation, and community building,” the company said in a report released last year.
Fiat Metaverse has Human Connection
“Examining its potential effect should be part of strategy discussions, with leaders accelerating their analysis of how the metaverse could drive a very different world within the next decade," the report said.
Stellantis (STLA), which owns the Fiat brand, said its Fiat Metaverse Store is the world's first metaverse-powered showroom.
The store, which debuted at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, was developed in collaboration with Microsoft (MSFT) and software company Touchcast.
Microsoft recently signed a $10 billion deal with ChatGPT's creators OpenAi. This is the third time Microsoft has pumped cash into OpenAI, following a $1 billion infusion in 2019 and a smaller investment in 2017.
Customers won’t be needing a VR headset, an avatar or specialized hardware to access the immersive store. All of that is integrated into Microsoft Teams.
There will be a human connection to the sales experience, thanks to the “Fiat Product Genius” who is always available to answer questions..
The Fiat Metaverse store is currently available in Italy, but it will expand soon to other countries, including the U.S.
Touchcast CEO Edo Segal told Axios that the grafting of the physical and digital worlds is the beginning of a massive revolution in the car-buying experience.
“It raises the fidelity of communications," he said. "It's even better than being in a dealership."
Customers Walk Through Virtual Showroom
And then there’s Kia Germany metaverse store, which runs on Engage, the business-focused metaverse platform.
Kia scheduled a live event on Feb. 23 to mark the platform's debut.
Customers can access the space on a mobile device or computer, but the best experience is on a VR headset.
They can walk through a virtual showroom via digital avatars and interact with the vehicles, check out the service bays and get their questions answered by clicking on links that take them to Kia's website.
This technology sounds nice, but with all this metaverse sales talk, should flesh and blood sales people be worried?
David Jacoby, a managing director at Sales Readiness Group, a corporate sales training firm, doesn't think AI will be replacing human sales staff anytime soon.
While AI seems different from other much-hyped technological advances, he said that Skynet, the evil AI from all those Terminator flicks, hasn’t taken over yet.
"AI will continue to evolve and improve, but these improvements will make salespeople more efficient, not replace them entirely," Jacoby wrote on Feb. 27.
"An important consideration is that the most successful salespeople are typically those who build strong customer relationships," he said. "That's a task that’s uniquely suited to human beings."
