About this keynote
Firstly, thank you to Pekka Rissa the CEO of AKL, the Autoalan Keskusliitto of Finland, for inviting me to be their keynote for this year’s AKL Summit, held in Helsinki, where more than a thousand Finnish car dealers came together for the first time since the onset of the pandemic to discuss the future of their industry and businesses.
As Finland’s central association for the automotive industry AKL represents over 3,000 Finish car dealerships who, in the face of rising Electric Vehicle (EV) sales, as well as semi and eventually fully autonomous vehicles, are now seeing their livelihoods threatened and their revenues and profits drop by as much as 80 percent, driven primarily by the fact that unlike internal combustion engine vehicles (ICE) EV’s simply don’t need the same amount of after sales servicing or repair. Namely, they only need the occasional new brakes, tyres, or sensor or wiring tweaks.
As the automotive industry globally comes to a crossroads car dealers everywhere face the very real prospect of either being forced to adapt to the new norm or being disrupted and put out of business by it. And, going on current projections, dealers have around five years to adapt or suffer the consequences.
Naturally, this has left many dealers questioning how they adapt, so during my keynote entitled Taking Opportunity Mobile I showed them not only what they can do and why, but also showed them how the companies they rely on, the car manufacturers themselves, are increasingly pivoting to become not better car companies, but tech powered super app companies.
