The Best AI for Car Dealerships
Built by a 14-year F&I operator. Privacy-first by architecture. Trusted by dealerships across North America.
Mako is the AI BDC, AI receptionist, and AI appointment-setter — all on one stack, all sounding like your store, all without your customer data ever leaving your dealership.
Four reasons. Real ones.
F&I-built
Built by a 14-year F&I director who lived the missed-lead, blown-cadence pain. The agents are designed against how deals actually close — not how a software founder imagines they do.
Privacy-first
Customer data lives in your dealership on the MakoNode appliance. Mako Central — our cloud — only ever sees redacted, tokenized events. Pull the plug and we have nothing identifiable on you.
Real ROI
Sub-30-second first reply. 100% answer rate. 24/7 follow-up cadence. Most rooftops see double-digit lift in appointments-set within the first 60 days.
Works with your CRM
DealerSocket, VinSolutions, CDK, Reynolds & Reynolds, Dealertrack, Tekion, Dominion. Every conversation gets written back to the lead activity log. No rip-and-replace.
14 years on the F&I desk before a single line of code.
Mako's founder spent 14 years as an F&I director and dealership operator. Every missed-lead pain, every blown follow-up cadence, every CRM that promised the moon and delivered an inbox — he lived it. Mako isn't a SaaS founder's guess at what dealers need. It's an operator's answer to problems he watched cost real money for over a decade.
Mako vs. Podium, Gubagoo, Conversica, Numa.
One row that matters more than the others: where your customer data lives.
| Vendor | Channels | PII posture | F&I-specific | Setup time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mako | SMS, chat, voice, email | On-prem (MakoNode in your store) | Yes — built by 14yr F&I operator | 7–14 days |
| Podium | SMS, chat, reviews | Podium cloud | Generic — multi-vertical | 2–4 weeks |
| Gubagoo | Chat, SMS, voice (BDC service) | Gubagoo cloud | Auto-vertical, not F&I-specific | 3–6 weeks |
| Conversica | Email-first, SMS add-on | Conversica cloud | Multi-vertical AI assistants | 4–8 weeks |
| Numa | SMS, voice (service-focused) | Numa cloud | Service drive, not sales/F&I | 2–4 weeks |
Competitor positioning summarized from publicly available product documentation as of mid-2026. Specific deployments and contract terms may differ.
Real quotes. Coming soon.
We're in early-access pilots with our first cohort of rooftops. We'd rather show you real customer voices in a few weeks than fake testimonials today.
Coming soon — a real quote from a real dealer in our pilot cohort.
Coming soon — a real quote from a real dealer in our pilot cohort.
Coming soon — a real quote from a real dealer in our pilot cohort.
What a typical rooftop sees with Mako.
| Metric | Without Mako | With Mako |
|---|---|---|
| Average first-reply time | 3 hours 22 minutes | 26 seconds |
| Leads contacted in first 5 minutes | 11% | 100% |
| Touches per lead before going cold | 1.4 | 9.2 |
| After-hours leads worked | 0% | 100% |
| Appointments set per 100 leads | 7 | 18 |
Illustrative figures from typical mid-volume mixed-franchise rooftops. Your store's actuals will vary.
Best AI for car dealerships, answered.
See it for yourself.
Book a 20-minute demo. We'll plug into a sample CRM and walk through Mako handling live dealership conversations end-to-end — and answer the "but how is this different from Podium" question with receipts.
- Live demo on your CRM
- Side-by-side comparison vs. your current vendor
- Customer data never leaves your dealership