Apple’s patent for ‘virtual salesperson system and method’ (especially for a car dealership) — Apple World Today

Apple says that, rom an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) perspective, the dealership salespeople may not be fully trained to highlight all the key features and differentiators of the vehicles effectively. (An OEM is a company that manufactures and sells products or parts of a product that their buyer, another company, sells to its own customers while putting the products under its own branding.)

From a dealership perspective, a dealer must maintain appropriate staff to handle peak loads like weekday evenings or weekends which is expensive. From a salesperson perspective, customers may not be knowledgeable about the vehicle and require a lot of time to close a sale. From a customer perspective, they have to interact with a potentially distrusted salesperson whose interests aren’t necessarily aligned with the customers, especially if they want a vehicle that isn’t on the dealer’s lot. 

Apple’s solution to such scenarios: a virtual salesperson.

Here’s the summary of the invention: “A virtual salesperson system and method for tablet computers such as Apple’s iPad can be used by the customer (as opposed to most applications which are for the dealer, or on a central kiosk) to provide the customer a tour of a showroom and each vehicle, highlighting key features and other content at the discretion of the OEM, such as videos tours conducted by their spokesperson. 

“In at least one embodiment, the customer can also search inventory, potentially at this dealer and other “friendly” dealerships with whom this dealer has a trading relationship. Other sales tools such as build and price, payment estimation, etc are available as well.”