Motago.ai

Car dealerships lose buyers every evening and weekend, when nobody answers the phone. MITDEV built Motago.ai to fix that: an AI sales assistant that answers every call, text, email, chat and marketplace inquiry in under 60 seconds, 24/7, and sends warm buyers to the sales team.

The challenge

Motago started from a problem its founders knew from US car dealerships: many buyers call and write after hours, on weekends or from another time zone, when the showroom is closed. Every missed call or unanswered message is a buyer who may drive to the lot next door.

Covering every hour with people is expensive. A dealership would need extra salespeople just to answer the phone and the inbox, and most of those conversations are routine questions about availability, price and visiting times. To hand this work to AI, the bar was high:

• Fast: an answer to every lead in seconds, on every channel, day and night.
• Right: answers based on the dealer's real inventory and prices, never on guesses.
• Human: a voice and a tone that feel like a helpful salesperson, not a script.

What we built

A working prototype, before any contract. Before anything was signed, we built a prototype of the AI assistant and showed it to the founders and to a dealership. From there, MITDEV chose the AI models, the tools and the architecture, and took the platform from prototype to launch.

Answer every lead. Riley picks up phone calls, texts, emails and website chats, as well as Facebook messages and inquiries from car marketplaces such as Cars.com, AutoTrader and CarGurus. Every call is recorded, transcribed and summarised, and messages can be translated, so buyers can write in their own language.

Turn conversations into visits. Riley answers from the dealer's live inventory, synced down to each car's VIN, so it never offers a car that has already been sold. It qualifies the buyer, books a visit in the dealership's calendar, sends reminders and keeps track of no-shows.

Keep the team in charge. Every conversation lands in one inbox, next to a real-time dashboard. When a lead is ready, the salesperson gets an SMS alert with a direct link to the conversation and steps in with the full context. The platform connects to the systems dealers already use, such as Tekion, CDK Global, DealerTrack and DealerSocket.

How it works

A lead can arrive from anywhere: a call, a text, an email, the dealer's website, Facebook or a car marketplace. Within a minute, Riley answers in a natural tone, asks what the buyer is looking for and checks the live inventory before it talks about any car. When the buyer is ready, it books a visit and sends reminders.

The salesperson then meets a buyer who already knows the car, the price and the time of the visit. Buyers who go quiet are not forgotten: Riley follows up on its own when a car they asked about drops in price or gets sold, and when they view a listing on a marketplace.

Under the hood

An AI that talks to buyers has to be fast, but above all it has to be right. When software speaks for a business, one wrong answer costs more than a slow one. Four decisions made Riley safe to put in front of buyers:

• Answers grounded in live data. Riley never answers from memory. It works with the dealer's real data, from the live inventory to the calendar and the CRM, through dedicated tools (custom MCP servers), so a new integration is added as a tool, not as a change inside the AI.
• A guard on every action. Before the AI books a visit, sends a message or updates a lead, a separate control layer checks that the action is allowed and correct.
• Quality checked on every conversation. Conversations are scored automatically and the team can flag a bad answer, so the AI is tuned on real dealer conversations, not on test scripts.
• Built to run around the clock. Follow-ups, reminders, notifications and call summaries run as background tasks on Kubernetes, with automated deployments

An honest note. The hardest part was not the code. It was tuning the AI on real dealer questions and making its voice sound natural, conversation after conversation.

Results

Motago went from a prototype to a product dealers pay for in about 4.5 months.

• About 3.5 months of development and 1 month of testing and launch, with a senior team of three.
• 13+ dealerships became paying customers in the first month.
• Every lead gets an answer in under 60 seconds, on every channel, 24/7.
• Salespeople spend their time with buyers who are ready to visit. In Motago's own video, they describe having more time to sell, because buyers reach them warmer, further down the funnel.
• One dealer reports response times going from 4 hours to 60 seconds, and a 35% higher show rate in the first month.