Built in Scotland, for Scottish dealers first
Kestrel is built in Scotland, and we are launching with the dealerships on our own doorstep before anywhere else. That is partly loyalty. Mostly it is because selling and servicing cars here has its own shape, and an agent that does not understand it will not be much use.
Kestrel Automotive Intelligence, Scotland, UK
Most software for the motor trade is designed somewhere else and arrives here later, with the assumptions of somewhere else built in. We wanted to do it the other way round: build for the dealers we can drive to, get it right for them, and let the rest of the UK follow.
What is different about here
Distance. A customer of a dealership in Inverness, Dumfries or Oban may live an hour from the site. That changes what a service booking is. Courtesy cars, collection and delivery, and "while you wait" are not extras, they are the booking. An agent that books an MOT without asking how the customer is getting home has not finished the job.
The phone. A large part of the trade here still runs on the phone, and on the phone after six. A website chat box on its own misses that. The agent has to be a voice on the line as much as a box on the page, and it has to be the same agent with the same memory in both places.
Place names and accents. An agent that cannot hear "Kirkcaldy", "Milngavie" or "Ecclefechan" correctly, or that stumbles on a Doric speaker, will lose the customer in the first ten seconds. We test the voice agent on Scottish accents and Scottish place names as a matter of routine, not as a special case.
Weather and seasons. Winter tyres, the MOT rush after the holidays, the run of service enquiries when the clocks go back. A dealer's diary here has a rhythm, and reporting that ignores it is reporting about somewhere else.
What "first" actually means
It is easy to say "Scottish dealers first" and mean a postcode filter on the sales pipeline. We mean something more concrete.
- Our launch dealerships are in Scotland, and we set the service up on site, with the sales and service teams in the room.
- Support is in the same time zone and, mostly, the same accent. When a dealer rings, they get someone who has stood on a forecourt in January.
- The things that shape the product next come from those dealers: what their customers ask, what their teams need to see, what did not work on a Saturday morning.
- Your customers' data stays in the UK, on infrastructure we control, under UK law. We have written about that separately in Sovereign by design.
The point of starting close to home is not sentiment. It is that you cannot build a good agent for the motor trade from a spreadsheet. You build it by listening to real enquiries, and the ones we can listen to first are here.
Part of something bigger
Scotland has a serious ambition for AI: a national strategy, universities producing the people, and a growing number of companies building useful things rather than talking about them. Motor retail is not usually on that list. We think it should be. Dealerships are local businesses with real customers, real stock and real diaries, and they are exactly the kind of business that practical AI can help without a transformation programme. Building that here, with dealers here, is our contribution.
If you run a dealership in Scotland
We would like to show you Kestrel on your own stock, on your own website, with your own diary. It takes about half an hour. If you are one of the first, you will also get a say in what it does next.