Nashville is one of those cities that has a way of raising the energy in any room. Pair that with three days of dealership leaders, CDK product teams, OEM partners, and industry-focused sessions, and you get something that’s hard to replicate anywhere else. That’s what CDK Connect Live 2026 delivered.
We came in as a certified partner and sponsor, and the experience reminded us why these events matter. You hear things in hallways and breakout rooms that you never get from a report. You pick up on where the industry actually stands. You notice which sessions had people leaning in and talking afterward, and which conversations kept circling back to the same few pain points no matter where you were standing.
This year had more than 50 breakout sessions spread across three tracks (technology, accounting, and heavy truck), plus main-stage moments that set the tone for the week. We came home with a lot to think about. Here are the five things that stood out most.
Jonathan Brill, ranked the number one futurist in the world by Forbes, delivered the keynote, and the word "transformation" landed differently than it has in past years. This was not a 'here's what's coming' conversation. It was all about what's already in motion, and how to run toward it instead of getting caught flat-footed.
The energy in the room confirmed that shift. Dealership leaders are not debating whether AI belongs in their operations anymore. The question has moved to where it fits, what it actually changes, and how you build confidence around it when the output touches approvals, vendor records, or anything that an auditor might look at later.
That tension came up throughout the week. Nobody was dismissing AI. The skepticism was more targeted: "Show me what it does when things are messy." That’s a healthy and important question. The teams that will get the most out of AI-powered tools are the ones asking exactly that, because sustainable value comes from AI that works inside your real workflow, not a cleaned-up demo environment.
For finance and accounting teams, the most practical AI conversation centers on data capture, approval routing, and exception handling. Speed matters, but only when the decision trail is clean on the other side.
This was the inaugural year CDK organized a dedicated accounting track, and it showed up with substance. Sessions covering how to maximize AP and accounts receivable solutions, streamline financial processes, and modernize payment workflows gave dealership controllers and finance leaders something specific to work with, not just ideas to take home.
There was a clear appetite in these sessions for anything that reduces the back-and-forth at month-end. That’s a universal frustration. According to industry benchmarks, best-in-class AP teams close invoice cycles in an average of 3.1 days. The average for everyone else sits at 17.4 days. For a multi-rooftop dealership group running high invoice volume every month, that gap is not just a process problem. It is a cash flow and visibility problem.
Document management was not just a pain point. For many teams it was the most talked about pain point, and it's one that most AP tools still treat as an afterthought. The frustration ran deeper than invoices sitting in the wrong inbox. Warranties, repair orders, contracts, and dealer jackets are scattered across systems, inboxes, and filing cabinets, and when you need one fast, you rarely find it fast. Whether that moment comes during an audit, a vendor dispute, or a close that is already running behind, the inability to put your hands on the right document at the right time makes everything downstream harder.
The accounting track felt like the beginning of a longer and overdue conversation, and we’re here for it.
The fraud and compliance sessions didn’t feel like warnings. They felt like operational playbooks, and that shift in framing matters.
A recent industry survey found that 77% of dealerships reported an increase in fraud-related activity over the past 24 months. That number makes sense in context. More digital transactions, faster payment cycles, and more entry points for bad actors looking for gaps in the approval chain. The fraud methods getting the most traction right now aren't dramatic. They’re quiet. A vendor email requesting updated banking details right before a check run. An urgent ACH request that bypasses the normal approval flow. An invoice that looks right until you try to match it to a purchase order that doesn't exist.
What we kept hearing from people across the week was a common frustration. The controls they have are either too loose to catch anything or too rigid to keep work moving at pace. The goal is guardrails that make the process cleaner and faster, not a compliance burden that creates its own bottlenecks.
Nearly 29% of AP leaders still identify fraud risk as a major ongoing challenge, and that tracks with what we heard on the show floor. The dealerships making the most progress here are the ones treating fraud prevention as a process design problem, not just a security checklist. Clear approval thresholds, consistent vendor verification, documented payment trails. Those things don’t slow you down when they're built into the workflow from the start.
Staffing came up everywhere, and the conversation has matured. Nobody is pretending that the answer is simply to hire more people. The realistic version comes down to one question. How do you make the work easier to run so that your existing team can handle more volume without burning out or making mistakes?
The honest answer for most of the teams we talked to is that they're still running heavily manual processes. A lot of people acknowledged their current setup works well enough today. That's not a wrong answer, but it's a fragile one, and almost everyone knew it. The numbers back that up. Manual AP processing costs between $18 and $26 per invoice. Best-in-class automated teams bring that down to $2.50 to $4. For a dealership processing hundreds of invoices a month, that gap adds up fast.
CDK's accounting sessions touched directly on this, with content focused on workflows, tools, and resources built to help finance teams work faster and with more confidence. That framing matters. It's not about replacing people. It's about removing the parts of the job that drain time and erode accuracy.
The AP version of this problem is familiar to anyone who has managed it. When invoices arrive without proper documentation, when approvals happen in email threads instead of a defined workflow, when the month-end close involves chasing down paper that should have been filed two weeks ago, all of that compounds. And when someone on the team leaves, that institutional knowledge walks out with them.
The dealerships building resilience are doing it by standardizing what "done" looks like across every step of the process. Clean inputs. Consistent approvals. Documentation that stays with the work. When the workflow is teachable, it scales. When it lives in someone's head, it doesn’t.
The organizations thinking furthest ahead were the ones planning for growth through acquisition. The dealership buy/sell market set a record in 2025, with 458 transactions and 688 franchises sold, and experts expect 2026 to be even more active. Almost every one of those conversations came back to the same realization: the way they manage AP today will not survive adding another rooftop. For those groups, automation isn’t just an efficiency play. It’s the infrastructure that makes growth operationally possible.
If there was one thread that connected every track at CDK Connect 2026, it was that dealerships want their tools to talk to each other and stop requiring people to be the integration layer.
The technology sessions covered embedded AI, advanced analytics, CDK's AI Virtual Assistant (AIVA), and APIs designed to give teams faster access to cleaner data. The accounting sessions demonstrated how automation and DMS integration can reduce the manual steps between an invoice arriving and a payment going out. The heavy truck track had particular energy this year, and as a team that works inside this space every day, that didn't surprise us. The operational complexity these dealers manage makes the case for connected, visible workflows even stronger.
The recurring frustration, no matter which track you were in, was fragmentation. When systems are disconnected, people fill the gap. They re-enter data, screenshot approvals, forward invoices to the right person, and try to reconcile two different records of the same transaction. That’s where time disappears and errors multiply.
The shift we’re watching is dealers getting serious about building fewer, better-connected workflows instead of layering on tools that create new problems. It's a maturity signal for the industry, and it's the right direction.
CDK Connect 2026 was three days of sharp conversations and strong sessions in a city that doesn't let the energy drop. What we took away was not just a list of product updates or industry stats. It was a clearer picture of where dealership back-office operations are heading and what the teams leading the way are doing differently.
The pattern is consistent. More control, more clarity, and less reliance on workarounds that only one or two people understand. Whether the conversation was about AP, fraud, staffing, or systems integration, everyone is chasing the same outcome. An operation that runs predictably, documents itself, and doesn't fall apart when things get busy.
That's exactly what we build at onPhase, and it's the reason events like this energize our whole team.
If you’re ready to put any of this into practice, The 90-Day AP Stack Checkup Every Multi-Rooftop Dealer Should Run is a good next step.