Dealer AI Glossary
The terms behind dealership AI,
defined in plain language.
- Buying power
- The deal a customer can actually carry today: their live credit tier, equity position and workable payment combined. Buying power is the number GRIP scores before any conversation starts, which is why its agents can talk payments instead of guessing.
- Credit prescreen (soft pull)
- A lender-grade credit check that needs no SSN and never touches the customer's credit score. GRIP runs prescreens through a partnership with Equifax to verify who in a dealership's traffic can buy.
- Sales execution platform
- Software that carries a verified opportunity through the conversation to a booked appointment. It sits above the CRM, which keeps records, and beside marketing platforms, which buy reach. GRIP Intelligence is a credit-first sales execution platform for car dealerships.
- Deal state
- The live picture of one customer's workable deal: current vehicle, payoff, equity, credit tier, matching inventory and the payment options a desk could write today. GRIP builds a deal state for every qualified customer so nobody has to hunt for the numbers.
- Equity mining
- Finding the customers whose trade equity puts them in position to swap vehicles without hurting their payment. Done right it runs on verified credit and live payoff data, not on mailer lists.
- Service-to-sales
- Turning service-drive visits into vehicle sales while the customer's car is in the lane. The repair order tells you who is on the lot; buying power tells you who can trade.
- AI BDC
- An AI agent layer doing the outreach work of a business development center: opening conversations, answering questions and booking appointments. GRIP's agents run this work from each customer's verified buying power.
- Tier 1 buyer
- A customer whose prescreened credit lands in the strongest approval band. In GRIP, tiers rank every verified customer so the sales team works the deepest buying power first.
- Garage mapping
- Resolving which vehicles a household actually owns right now, so outreach lands on the right car with the right numbers instead of a vehicle they sold two years ago.
- Conquest campaign
- Outreach aimed at buyers who have never purchased from the store. The waste in conquest is spend on people who cannot buy; scoring buying power first is how the spend lands.
- Human-in-the-loop
- Campaign controls that route AI actions through a manager's approval before they reach customers. GRIP supports human-in-the-loop modes for stores that want a person on every send.
- TCPA compliance
- The federal rules that govern texting customers: documented consent, clear identification and honored opt-outs. GRIP's SMS conversations are one-to-one and consent-based by design.