Most of auto retail uses AI for the BDC after hours. Dustin Schuler of Bud Clary Auto Group builds: 14 stores' specials by 6am, and MCP as a vendor requirement.
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Ask most of auto retail what AI is for and you get one answer: the BDC, after hours.
Dustin Schuler is a bit different, and that is what initially interested me. He recently got back from Claude for Dealers, a sold out event in Atlanta last week.
He joined me this week on What's Working in Auto to talk event recap and all things AI.
The event was, "a workshop where you were building things you could bring back to the dealership the same day."
Dustin runs marketing for Bud Clary Auto Group, 14 stores in Washington State. Six days into October he had used, by his own count, 5.7 billion tokens. After an hour with him on What's Working in Auto, I think it's safe to say he's a pioneer in automotive retail.
Reflecting on the event, it was split into two tracks, beginner and advanced.
The beginner track unlocked new techniques beyond prompting, like computer use. "Just tell Claude to go to that website and execute step one through five." Someone realized it could go pull their co-op dollars.
In the advanced track, operators from across the country, Dustin found, were independently building the same things in-house: a customer data platform, a marketing automation platform, replacing software they pay for. By his account, people who were experimenting six months ago are building full platforms now.
His read on the curve from beginner to builder: "faster than people expect."
So what does one of those builds look like on an ordinary Tuesday?
Dustin's department lives on a 30-day clock. Incentives drop, and someone rebuilds the specials and banners on every store's website.
At Bud Clary that was 14 stores and, Dustin says, "a full day, a day and a half" of a designer's time for three banners.
Now, agents run the build. Jobs kick off at 6am the morning incentives come out. The workflow pulls the programs, builds the specials and banners against the OEM compliance and brand files he keeps beside it, places them on each site with lead forms attached, and finishes in about 30 minutes across the group. It runs from the Claude desktop app, not a terminal, with a password manager handling the logins. Build time, by his estimate: an hour or two.
That is the practical half. The other half is how he buys now.
His wife is a service manager. "She had seven different screens she had to log into." Dustin has a name for it: ADD, another dang dashboard.
So the first thing he asks a vendor is whether his AI can work inside their system directly. MCP, the open standard that lets a model read and act in another company's software, "was a nice to have," he said, "and now it's becoming more of a requirement." Analytics come to him instead of him clicking a report for each store.
For Dustin, Claude is now his primary dashboard (OpenAI Codex can do the same thing). MCP is how he connects Claude to various tools, pulling the capabilities of each directly into one portal.
ODD. One dang dashboard. The dream.
He is not building everything. "I could build a CRM, I could build a DMS." He does not want the tech debt or the uptime risk of either. What he pays for now is the piece that has to be there Monday morning. What he builds is the piece that eats his month.
One Bud Clary site logged 830 sessions from LLMs last month, by Dustin's count.
In 2024 a customer walked in holding the transcript of the prompt that found them: "the cheapest lease special within a hundred miles of Seattle."
Adobe puts AI-referred visitors to U.S. retail sites at 60% higher conversion than other traffic.
Ask an assistant that question about your own town tonight, and see whose specials it reads back. The customer is already past the BDC.
Claude for Dealers returns to Atlanta January 5 to 7, 2027, at the Westin Peachtree Plaza. Learn more at learnclaudefordealers.com. It is an independent event, curated by Gray Scott and Brian Pasch, not Anthropic's.
Listen to What's Working in Auto.
See you next week - Jake
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