At NADA Show 2026 in Las Vegas, Sam Cox gave a session called Tech & Trust: Leading with Emotional Intelligence in the A.I. Age. It was aimed at American dealer principals, but the problem it describes will be familiar to anyone running a dealership in Gauteng or the Cape: you have never had more tools for measuring your people, and never had less time to actually talk to them.
We work with South African dealer groups on exactly this, so we watched the session and pulled out what applies here. The short version: the dealerships that get value out of AI are not the ones with the most tools. They are the ones whose managers use the time those tools give back to lead people properly.
The leadership gap: babysitter or builder
Cox opens with a distinction worth stealing. A sales manager is either a babysitter or a builder. The babysitter chases activity: how many calls, how many appointments, why is this number red. The builder develops people so the numbers move on their own.
Most managers do not choose to be babysitters. They drift into it, because chasing activity is what the systems make easy. Your DMS and CRM will tell you the moment a follow-up is missed. Nothing tells you that your best used-car salesperson has quietly stopped caring.
The moment that changed things for Cox was a team member telling him: “I just don’t feel like any of this matters anymore.” His conclusion was that leadership had become about numbers rather than people, and that nothing on his dashboard had warned him.
Why this matters more in South Africa, not less
It would be easy to file this under soft skills and move on. We would push back on that, for reasons specific to this market.
Replacing an experienced F&I manager or a top used-vehicle salesperson is expensive and slow. You carry the cost of the vacancy, the recruitment, and then months of a new person learning your stock, your banks and your customers. Every one of those rands is spent recovering ground you already held. Retention is not an HR concern in a dealership. It is a gross-profit concern.
South African dealerships also run leaner than their American counterparts. One manager often covers new and used, and sometimes F&I oversight too. When a manager is stretched that thin, the human part of the job is the first thing to get dropped, because it is the only part with no system nagging them to do it.
Why this matters for your dealership: if your managers are spending their week on admin that a tool could handle, you are paying experienced people to do work that does not need them, and losing the work that does.
The four habits: ask, recognise, celebrate, support
Cox builds on Daniel Goleman’s emotional intelligence model, which breaks down into self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social skills. That is the theory. The practical version he gives managers is four habits.
- Ask. Questions that are not about the pipeline. What is getting in your way this week?
- Recognise. Name what someone did well, specifically, close to when they did it.
- Celebrate. Mark the wins publicly, including the ones that are not deals: the difficult handover that went smoothly, the customer who came back.
- Support. Remove an obstacle rather than restate the target.
None of this is complicated. It is just the first thing to disappear on a busy month-end.
PACE: accountability with heart
The framework we found most directly useful is what Cox calls PACE, his structure for a one-to-one that holds someone accountable without reducing them to a number.
- P: Production. What was delivered. Units, gross, retention.
- A: Activity. What went in. Calls, follow-ups, test drives, appointments kept.
- C: Confidence. How they are feeling about the work. Where they are hesitant.
- E: Empathy. What is happening around the work that affects it.
Most dealership one-to-ones cover P and A and stop there. That is a review, not a conversation, and it is exactly the meeting people learn to survive rather than use. C and E are where a manager finds out that the numbers dipped because someone is commuting two hours each way since they moved, or because they have never been properly trained on the finance products they are expected to sell.
Why this matters for your dealership: P and A are already in your systems. You do not need a meeting to read them out. Use the meeting for C and E, which no system will ever capture.
Where AI actually fits
Cox’s position on AI is refreshingly unglamorous, and it matches what we see working in practice. AI is a leadership assistant. It buys back time on repetitive work. It does not lead anybody.
The examples he gives are ordinary on purpose: a general assistant like ChatGPT for drafting and summarising, and meeting tools such as Otter.ai or Read.ai that capture and summarise conversations so the manager is present in the room instead of typing. His line is the one to remember: tech is the tool, you are still the leader.
For a South African dealership, the highest-value uses we see are the dull ones. Summarising the week’s CRM notes so a manager walks into a one-to-one already informed. Drafting the follow-up after a difficult customer conversation. Turning a long WhatsApp thread with a customer into a clear record. Preparing the month-end commentary that currently eats a Sunday evening.
What we would not automate is anything the customer or the salesperson is supposed to experience as human. Auto-generated praise is worse than none. If a team member works out that their recognition was written by a machine, you have spent trust to save four minutes.
Why this matters for your dealership: the test is simple. Automate the preparation, never the relationship.
The technology and trust rhythm
The session’s operating model is a weekly rhythm, which is the part most likely to survive contact with a real dealership.
- Monday: goals and forecast alignment. Everyone knows the target and where they stand.
- Wednesday: midweek pulse check. Short, and early enough that the week can still be changed.
- Friday: one-to-ones and debriefs. The PACE conversation, properly.
Alongside it he sets out a Win the Day system: time-block the leadership moments so they are in the diary rather than left to spare capacity, use AI to simplify the admin, and lead with clarity, consistency and care.
The Wednesday check is the one dealerships skip, and it is the one that pays. A Friday conversation about a week that has already gone is a post-mortem. A Wednesday conversation is still a decision.
What to do on Monday
- Put the Monday, Wednesday and Friday slots in your managers’ diaries as recurring appointments, and treat them as unmovable as a manufacturer call.
- Restructure your one-to-one around PACE. Pull production and activity from the system beforehand so the meeting starts at confidence and empathy.
- Pick one admin task per manager that eats an hour a week and hand it to a tool. Summarising CRM notes is usually the easiest first win.
- Write down which tasks are off limits for automation. Recognition, difficult conversations and anything a customer will read as personal.
- Ask each manager one question this week that has nothing to do with the pipeline, and listen to the whole answer.
The honest conclusion
The pitch most dealerships hear about AI is that it will let them do more with fewer people. The more useful framing, and the one this session lands on, is that it lets the people you already have spend their time on the part of the job only a person can do.
You do not have to choose between efficient tools and emotional intelligence. The dealerships that will be difficult to compete with in three years are the ones running both: the admin automated, and a manager who noticed that someone had gone quiet.
If you would like a hand working out which parts of your managers’ week are safe to automate and which are not, get in touch. We will look at it with you.
Source
- Sam Cox, “Tech & Trust: Leading with Emotional Intelligence in the A.I. Age”, NADA Show 2026, Las Vegas, 3 to 6 February 2026. Frameworks referenced: Daniel Goleman’s emotional intelligence model, the PACE one-to-one structure, and the Technology + Trust weekly rhythm.