We covered the skepticism data out of Istanbul last week. Michael just got back and sat down with Paul this morning to fill in what the survey numbers couldn't show: what the room actually sounded like, who's really running the market over there, and one dealership doing something we don't really see here.

The research behind the trip hasn't changed, and it's still the clearest data point in the story. A survey of 27 dealership group executives, scored across 22 questions and five pillars, put average AI maturity at 47 out of 100.

Adoption still clusters almost entirely around the inbound flow, contact center and sales, both at 67%, while the highest-dollar, most regulated processes in the building remain almost untouched.

This is the part firsthand experience adds that the survey couldn't. Michael described sitting with a dealer group exec from Russia who casually mentioned paying roughly $200,000 for 90 days of HR training and consulting, through the marketplace that dominates that market, not a specialty vendor. The marketplace guarantees results.

That single marketplace covers CRM, DMS, listings, advertising, and leadership training under one roof. It's less a vendor relationship and more a franchise within a franchise, an entire operating layer dealers plug into rather than build.

Michael's read, as someone who came to the US as an immigrant: American dealers have an almost reflexive instinct to own their own ecosystem, to build the in-house AI team, the compliance infrastructure, the internal tools, rather than hand that control to one dominant platform. He traced it back further than the industry, calling it a founding-era cultural trait: stake your claim, control your spot. He said he's seen the marketplace-first pattern in parts of Europe too, just less pronounced than in Russia or Kazakhstan.

Dealers in the room knew the AI headlines. What they didn't have yet was proof. Michael's framing: they're not against it, they're skeptical in the specific way American dealers were back in early-to-mid 2024, wanting a tangible ROI story before committing, not a hypothetical one.

He tested that skepticism directly in his own keynote by asking who in the room used Yandex Business Profile, the regional equivalent of Google Business Profile. Every hand went up. He then asked who'd actually optimized it for visibility. Roughly 20%. Same gap, different platform.

The one operational model worth stealing: a dealer visit to AutoBid, a live consignment auction where private sellers bring in a vehicle, it gets inspected and lifted on-site, then auctioned in real time to attending dealers, with the seller paid out almost instantly once it sells. Steve Greenfield raised the obvious question on-site: what happens to arbitration if a dealer buys something that isn't what they thought? AutoBid absorbs that risk as the middleman. Consumers clearly like it. The operator's target is 25 to 26 locations across the region by next year.