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The car industry is being rebuilt from the ground up. Most dealers don't see it yet.

Margins are tightening. Chinese OEMs are landing in Europe with their own software stacks. Electric vehicles are reshaping the service revenue model dealers have relied on for decades. And somewhere in all of this, AI is quietly doing things that nobody is talking about publicly — yet.

Hélène Lanssens has spent over 20 years inside the machinery of automotive retail. She started her career as a dealer network trainer at Volkswagen France before moving through JATO Dynamics, where she mastered automotive data across 50+ markets, and Solera, where she led product strategy connecting repairers, adjusters, and insurers. That journey across OEMs, data intelligence, and aftersales gave her a panoramic view of the industry few people hold. Today she leads Partnerships and Product Marketing at Nextlane, one of Europe's largest automotive retail software groups.

In this conversation, we go deep.

• Why the dealers who survive the next five years will be the ones who treat data as infrastructure, not an afterthought
• Why the biggest risk with AI isn't adoption, it's stopping too early
• Why "we pick up the phone" is no longer the competitive advantage dealers think it is
• Why one-third of customer questions are already arriving when the showroom lights are off

We also get into the Nextlane open ecosystem model, the real story behind their platform connecting seven DMS systems across Europe through a single API layer, and what their new partnership with NOVACO actually unlocks for dealers on the ground.

This is not a conversation about what might happen someday. This is what is happening, explained by someone who has spent two decades building the systems behind it.