Car Lovers Roma honored at the Dealer Awards: digital innovation also runs through MIA by AitomotiveLab

Car Lovers Roma received the "Excellence in Digital Innovation" award at the Dealer Awards, a recognition given to automotive businesses capable of using technology, data, and innovation to improve processes, services, and customer relationships.

During the event, Alessandro Rubini, CEO of Web Industry, presented the award to three dealers that stood out for bringing concrete innovation to the sector: Trivellato, Bossoni, and Car Lovers Roma.

For AitomotiveLab, this recognition holds special meaning. Car Lovers Roma is a partner with whom, together with Smilenet, we launched a journey to integrate MIA, the vertical AI agent for the automotive world, into the dealership's main digital channels: webchat and WhatsApp Business.

The award-winning project stems from embedding the AI agent into the Car Lovers Roma website, built and managed by Smilenet, with the goal of covering digital channels 24/7, qualifying customer requests, and supporting commercial activities through outbound WhatsApp campaigns managed by artificial intelligence.

Not an experimental project, but a concrete application of AI in the dealer's daily processes: from the customer's first request to lead qualification, through commercial follow-up and re-engagement campaigns.

The 2025 baseline and first analyzed sample

The project starts from a real 2025 operating baseline: 52,100 leads, around 1,900 sales, and a 3.6% conversion rate. These figures describe the scale of the commercial flow; they are not results attributed to MIA.

The first MIA analysis covered a batch of 259 leads. The sample is used to observe purchase or trade-in intent, information completeness, response time, and BDC handoff. Before discussing sales uplift, the comparison must cover a longer period and separate channel, period, and lead source.

• 2025 baseline: 52,100 leads in the commercial flow.
• 2025 baseline: around 1,900 sales and a 3.6% conversion rate.
• First batch analyzed with MIA: 259 leads.
• Project metrics: qualification quality, ownership time, appointments, and outcomes.

An award that tells a story

Car Lovers Roma is a leading automotive business, part of an international group present in Italy and France. In recent years it has built a growth path based on investment, people, method, and technology.

Before the Dealer Awards recognition, Car Lovers had already earned important certifications, including Top Dealer Italia, the Legality Rating, and certification for Gender Equality.

The "Excellence in Digital Innovation" award adds another milestone to this journey: it confirms that innovation creates value when it truly enters the dealership's daily work, improving measurable processes and operational results.

Why Car Lovers' digital innovation was honored

The recognition highlights a concrete approach to innovation: using artificial intelligence not as an add-on, but as a lever to make commercial processes more effective.

In the case of Car Lovers Roma, integrating MIA made it possible to act on some central areas for every dealer:

• 24/7 coverage of webchat and WhatsApp channels.
• Lead qualification from the very first contact.
• More organized handling of requests from digital channels.
• Greater continuity in commercial follow-up.
• Outbound WhatsApp activity managed by AI.
• Reduced dispersion between digital channels and the sales team.
• Monitoring of impact on the most relevant commercial KPIs.

The goal is not simply to "automate responses", but to build a smoother process where every interaction generates useful context for salespeople and greater control for those coordinating the BDC and the commercial department.

MIA on webchat and WhatsApp: the heart of the award-winning project

The heart of the award-winning project is the integration of MIA, the AI agent developed by AitomotiveLab, into the channels where an increasingly important part of commercial dialogue now begins: the website and WhatsApp.

MIA is not a generic chatbot. It is a vertical AI agent for the automotive sector, designed to support dealerships and dealers in managing conversations, qualifying opportunities, and optimizing follow-up.

In the project with Car Lovers Roma, MIA covers webchat and WhatsApp channels, responding to user requests 24/7, collecting useful information, qualifying leads, and supporting the commercial team in the later stages of the process.

To this is added outbound WhatsApp activity, with campaigns managed by artificial intelligence to maintain continuity in customer relationships and make re-engagement actions more effective.

Through MIA, artificial intelligence enters commercial processes with a clear goal: help the team work better, reducing lost leads, improving the quality of information collected, and making every stage of the customer journey more measurable.

AitomotiveLab: AI agent for webchat, WhatsApp, and voice

AitomotiveLab develops vertical AI agents for the automotive world, designed to integrate into dealerships' real processes and support commercial teams on the main customer relationship channels.

MIA can operate across three main channels:

• Webchat, to cover the website and qualify incoming requests.
• WhatsApp, to manage conversations, follow-up, and outbound campaigns.
• Voice, to activate voice AI agents and outbound voice campaigns.

In the case of Car Lovers Roma, the journey that contributed to the Dealer Awards recognition focused on webchat and WhatsApp channels, with the addition of AI-managed outbound WhatsApp campaigns.

Smilenet's role: technology partner and web agency

The result achieved by Car Lovers Roma comes from concrete collaboration between the dealership team, Smilenet, and AitomotiveLab.

Smilenet is AitomotiveLab's technology partner and also supports Car Lovers Roma as a web agency, managing the website and related digital activities, including Meta and Google campaigns.

It was within the Car Lovers Roma website, built and managed by Smilenet, that AitomotiveLab introduced MIA, making it possible to integrate the AI agent into the dealership's digital flows.

This synergy made it possible to connect website, conversation channels, marketing activities, and commercial processes in a more coherent, measurable, and results-oriented journey.

A partnership built on daily work

The project is the result of shared work between the Car Lovers Roma team, Smilenet, and AitomotiveLab.

Together we worked on integrating MIA into the dealer's real processes, with the goal of improving lead management, supporting commercial teams, and making the impact of AI on results clearer.

For us, it is especially rewarding to collaborate with businesses that do not simply adopt new technologies, but help improve them. Car Lovers Roma brought vision, method, and continuous dialogue: essential elements for turning a technology solution into a truly useful project.

Gallery: the Dealer Awards evening

Dealer Awards 2026

Moments from the stage and backstage: the pitch, the award presentation, and the group photo with the Car Lovers Roma team.

The event reel

A look at the Dealer Awards evening: the pitch, the award presentation, and the moment when digital innovation applied to the dealer world took the stage.

What it means for other dealerships

The Car Lovers Roma case shows that artificial intelligence can generate real value when it is integrated into the right points of the commercial process.

It is not enough to "have AI". It needs to be placed where inefficiencies arise today: response times, incomplete qualification, inconsistent follow-up, conversations scattered across different channels, and poorly structured re-engagement campaigns.

An effective AI project for a dealership should start from a few fundamental elements:

• The channels where leads actually arrive: website, webchat, WhatsApp, phone.
• Qualifying requests before handing them to sales.
• Continuous coverage of digital channels, even outside opening hours.
• Activating outbound WhatsApp and voice campaigns when useful to the process.
• Connecting conversations, CRM, stock, and internal processes.
• Measuring operational KPIs, not just the number of chats or automated responses.
• Concrete support for teams, not replacing commercial work.

The journey with Car Lovers Roma goes exactly in this direction: using artificial intelligence where it is truly needed, in a concrete, measurable, and sustainable way.

Congratulations to the entire Car Lovers Roma team and to the partners who contribute to this journey every day. We are proud to be part of it and happy to share a story that can also be useful to other dealerships interested in bringing AI into their commercial processes.