From the Booth to the Breakouts: 5 Takeaways from NADA & ATD 2026

NADA & ATD 2026 in Las Vegas had the kind of energy you feel before you even make it to the show floor. We spent part of the week posted up at our booth, and the rest bouncing between education sessions, hallway conversations, and the quick “got a minute?” chats that turned into the kind of candid shop talk you only get in person.

That's what makes this week valuable. You get a real-time pulse on what dealerships are prioritizing, what’s changing, and what still feels harder than it should. And no matter who we were talking to, the same themes kept resurfacing, sometimes in sessions, sometimes five minutes later back at the booth.

The best part is you hear it from every angle: controllers and AP leaders trying to get month-end under control, fixed ops and parts teams chasing tighter throughput, and IT teams thinking about security and systems that actually connect.

There were a lot of strong sessions and more ideas than anyone could capture in one post. So instead of trying to summarize everything, we focused on the topics that came up over and over, the ones people kept circling back to in conversation.

Here are five signals we’re still talking about after the show.

AI is getting real, fast

You could feel the shift in how people talked about AI this year. Less “we should probably look at AI” and more “where does it actually fit, and what breaks when we add it?”

That mindset showed up in the way the show talked about AI too. One of the bigger AI conversations was framed as an operations decision, not a tech curiosity. That framing matched what we heard at our booth. People wanted the nuts-and-bolts version: what gets faster, what gets cleaner, and what still needs a human decision in the loop.

The most interesting AI conversations also came with a caution sign. People weren’t anti-AI. They were anti-surprise. They want tools that can explain themselves, especially when the output touches money, approvals, vendor records, or anything an auditor might ask about later. So the real ask wasn’t “give us AI.” It was “give us confidence.” If AI is going to move work faster, teams want to know the rules are still clear, the approvals still hold, and the trail still makes sense after the fact.

A line we heard more than once (in different words) was: “Show me what it does on a normal Tuesday.” That’s the shift. Curiosity has moved into accountability. The win is not speed by itself. It’s speed you can trust.

Fixed ops and parts are becoming a data discipline

Fixed ops wasn’t treated like a supporting character at this show. It was front and center, and the language was telling: more discipline, more visibility, fewer leaks.

We heard that in sessions focused on using data to drive fixed ops decisions, but the bigger signal was how people talked about it in passing. Leaders weren’t just chasing more volume. They were chasing tighter throughput. Faster handoffs. Cleaner decisions. Less waiting on “the one person who knows where that file lives.”

On the ATD side, that same mindset showed up through the parts and inventory lens. Vendor-managed inventory came up as a way to reduce guessing games, but the subtext was broader: dealers want fewer emergencies and more predictability. They want processes that behave the same way across locations, even when the week gets busy.

At the booth, we heard a lot of variations of the “almost right” problem. A return that sits because it’s missing context. A service approval that stalls because someone can’t find the RO, the PO, the packing slip, or the invoice backup that explains the charge. A parts decision made off a partial picture. None of those are dramatic alone, but across rooftops, they add up fast.

The teams that win are tightening the handoffs. Clean inputs and clear ownership beat last-minute fire drills every time.

Cybersecurity, fraud, and compliance are now everyday ops

This theme wasn’t a shock, but it was hard to ignore because it kept showing up across the week.

The agenda gave risk a real seat at the table. Cybersecurity showed up as a discipline, not a quarterly checklist. Fraud showed up as something you plan for, not something you react to. Compliance showed up as an operating reality, not a legal footnote.

On the show floor, these conversations were rarely abstract. They were practical: who can change vendor information, what approvals are required, how you reduce “one-off” workarounds, and how quickly you can spot something that doesn’t look right. Usually that “something” was pretty familiar: a vendor emailing new banking details right before a check run, a request to release an ACH “ASAP” outside the normal approval chain, or an invoice that suddenly needs to be paid by a different method because “we’ve always done it this way.”

We also heard a clear tension: nobody wants controls that slow everything down. The appetite is for guardrails that make work cleaner and faster because the rules are obvious and the record is complete. In other words, the goal is fewer loopholes without adding friction.

Risk is becoming an operations habit. The risk isn’t just “fraud out there,” it’s the gaps in the process that make it possible, like approvals happening off to the side, vendor updates handled ad hoc, or payments pushed through without thresholds and clear sign-offs. What teams want is simple: clear checkpoints that prevent those gaps, and visibility that makes it easy to confirm those checkpoints happened without digging through inboxes.

Dealers are done with tool sprawl

There’s a noticeable impatience right now with “another platform” and “another portal.” The theme isn’t anti-technology. It’s anti-friction.

Even in sessions that were nominally about customer experience or digital retailing, the message was familiar: disconnected systems create disconnected outcomes. When tools don’t talk, people become the integration. They copy, paste, screenshot, forward, and reconcile. That’s where time disappears and errors show up.

At the booth, the tool sprawl pain point usually showed up as status questions. “Did it get approved?” “Where is it?” “What changed?” “Who has it?” If answering that requires three logins and two people, the process is broken, even if every individual tool is “good.”

Dealers want fewer detours and one story they can trust. They’re prioritizing visibility and cohesion over another set of features they’ll have to train on.

People and training are being treated like an operating system

If you only looked at the tech headlines, you’d think the whole show was AI. It wasn’t. A big portion of the agenda focused on staffing realities: hiring, training, workforce development, and generational shifts.

What we heard in conversations was even more direct: teams are expected to do more, and “just hire” isn’t a plan. The more interesting focus is making the work easier to learn and easier to run, so performance doesn’t hinge on tribal knowledge.

That showed up in discussions about turning training into performance, but it also showed up in how leaders talked about day-to-day operations. Standardize what “done” looks like. Reduce side spreadsheets. Make approvals predictable. Keep the documentation with the work. If the process is clear, people ramp faster, burnout drops, and the team can handle volume without constantly adding headcount.

The winners aren’t just adding tools. They’re building repeatability. When the workflow is teachable, it’s scalable.

Where we go from here

If we had to sum up NADA & ATD 2026 in one sentence, it’s this: dealers are pushing for speed, but they want it paired with control.

That showed up everywhere, from AI discussions to VMI to cybersecurity and workforce development. The common thread is operational clarity:

• Clear inputs (clean data, fewer exceptions)
• Clear handoffs (work stays in the workflow, not scattered across email threads)
• Clear accountability (you can explain what happened, who touched it, and what’s next)

That’s the lens we’re taking into the rest of 2026, and it’s also why we love these events. You leave with more than a stack of notes. You leave with patterns, language, and a better sense of what “good” looks like right now. And you leave with a fresh appreciation for how many dealership problems sound different on the surface, but share the same root cause underneath.

If you would like to see what this could look like in your own dealership workflow, schedule some time with one of our dealership automation experts.