Smartening Up: How Dealers, Marinas and Service Facilities Can Benefit From AI

Recently, Marina Holdings Inc., parent company of Yarmouth Boat Yard and Moose Landing Marina, started using artificial intelligence (AI), and many of its sales reps found an unexpected benefit from the software. They use it to help respond to boat inquiries from prospects.

“AI lets them pull together the key points they want to cover in an email, then ChatGPT will craft the reply to ensure all spelling and grammar is correct, and the wording is clear and professional,” said Will Monson, general sales manager at Marina Holdings.

Marina Holdings also uses ChatGPT to build marketing campaigns more efficiently and, like with many marinas, the generative AI system helps facilitate gathering specifications and details on boats taken on trade.
“We put all the information on every boat we take in trade into ChatGPT, and we build our website descriptions of each boat using AI,” Monson said. “If it’s a boat we don’t sell, we often don’t have all the specs. ChatGPT will pull it all over, and it’s usually pretty darn accurate.”

These are examples of what Parker Valdez calls taking a business from “AI curious to AI capable.” In early July, he founded a new business called Dealer Activation after spending 12 years with the Boat House Group of boat dealerships in Cape Coral, Florida. He was most recently the chief financial officer at the company and was part of the team that spearheaded the company’s efforts to take a leading role in the use of AI.

The parents of two young kids, Valdez and his wife were expecting their third child in September. This could easily lead to questions about the sanity of starting a new business in July, but Valdez has a vision.

“What gave me the interest to go out and do this is the vast potential after launching our 10 locations, 300 employees, and seeing the difference it made to the front lines and the behavior change to use these tools that are already available,” he said.

Whether it’s ChatGPT, Claude, or the Marine Retailers Association of the Americas’ AI for Marine Industry Education (AIMIE), boat and engine dealers, marinas and service operations can benefit from implementing AI. It can streamline email blasts, manage slip assignments or clean up the history of a boat’s service record, among other services.

“The same implementation gap exists across service-marina operations, administrator-customer communication and development,” Valdez said. “Imagine you’re the service adviser trying to process a warranty claim. It takes five minutes just to find the file. Then you must read the black-and-white language about what’s included and excluded. AI can compress that so they don’t have to search for it. The adviser can just make an inquiry. That’s just one out of 1,000 applications.”

He continued, “People in dealerships aren’t lazy or underachieving. They’re just buried all the time. How are contracts being filled? Are they still paper and pen? If you have 1,700 slips, there’s a process to collect insurance, gather all the information and make it compliant.”

Non-Stop Evolution
Much like marine electronics, AI for marinas and dealerships is constantly moving forward. MRAA president Matt Gruhn went to the National Retail Federation’s annual conference in New York City and experienced the fast-forwarding firsthand.

“They didn’t talk about generative AI at all. It was all about AI agents,” he said. Generative AI reacts to a question, gives an answer and waits for the next prompt. Agentic AI breaks down goals, makes decisions and takes independent actions.

Gruhn said the message he’s getting from most dealers is that they want to get started with AI, but they don’t know how. That’s why in 2023, the association decided to launch AIMIE. “ChatGPT pulls answers from Reddit, which is full of opinions and comments and personal preferences,” Gruhn said. “That’s dangerous when you’re trying to run a business.”

AIMIE, on the other hand, only knows what it has been trained on. All the information that has been input to AIMIE has come from MRAA members or experts that consult for the association. “We have expert articles from subject-matter trainers, and we have partner insights,” Gruhn said. “AIMIE’s collective intelligence comes from best practices, strategies and insights from around the industry.”

MRAA has also built a data library. A dealer looking to learn about trends in the industry from the last five years can look at the organization’s Pulse Reports that survey dealers monthly. If AIMIE gives a dealer a list of the top five trends retailers have identified and the dealer says it’s having problems with number four, AIMIE will provide best practices and access to articles and data that can only be accessed by the MRAA and its members.

“The crux of the whole thing is that it’s vetted content from the association that they can trust,” Gruhn said.

Increased Efficiency
At Marina Holdings, Monson and marketing director Tracy Coughlin used AI to collaborate on a “trade-in, trade-up” promotion. “We came up with the basic framework, put it into AI, and it came up with, ‘This is what we think you should do for a spend. This is what we think you should use for some terms and hot buttons,’” he said. “It took me 15 minutes to build this versus an hour to type it all out, come up with the ideas and come up with a plan.”

Coughlin is an AI advocate, but she also cautions that a person still needs to edit documents, campaigns and emails, deleting words that don’t belong. “I regularly go back and disable words that aren’t relevant to what we want in our search campaigns,” she said. “AI will bring in keywords that don’t pertain to our goals like sailboats and brands we don’t sell.”

She also cautions against letting AI, Meta or another source upsell quantity over quality. “Meta and Google are always saying you need to spend more,” Coughlin said. “I’m a strong believer that more leads aren’t always better. I’d rather fine-tune my campaigns to generate leads with more quality.”

At Dealer Activation, Valdez said that when a company partners with him and his 60-day AI Ignition, it’s more than a new program or policy. It’s a culture change. “It’s not some paywall I created or special software,” he said. “The biggest leap forward for dealerships is that people understand how it augments them and adds value, and it’s not taking their job.”

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