Inside Ford’s AI-Driven Approach to Scaling Dealer Analysis

FordDirect, a joint venture between Ford Motor Company and its dealers, partnered with consultancy OneMagnify to tackle a critical business problem: winning back dealers who had left the AdVantage digital advertising program. They built a governed AI agent on the Domo platform to transform a fragmented, manual analysis process into an automated workflow. The agent was designed to analyze and rank dealer performance, specifically comparing the last three months a dealer was in AdVantage to the three months after they left, while accounting for external factors like seasonality.

The system generates clear narrative text and visual outputs for sales teams, providing 'opportunity stories' based on cleaned data with guardrails to prevent AI hallucination. A human-in-the-loop verifies the outputs match real-world conditions. In its application, the AI agent identified 97 at-risk or terminated dealers in 2025 and delivered 24 targeted opportunity stories. This data-driven approach successfully brought 10 dealers back into the program by demonstrating concrete benefits, such as one case where AdVantage was shown to drive 34% more leads and 20% more vehicle sales.

Beyond direct conversions, the automation delivered massive efficiency gains. The project resulted in a 75% reduction in the hours spent manually creating dealer data and a 90% reduction in the turnaround time from initial analysis to a finalized, persuasive story for the sales team. This shift turned a slow, bespoke reporting task into a scalable decision engine that empowers sales with actionable intelligence.