Rapidious co-founders Kishore Rajgopal and Justin Marvin say artificial intelligence can improve an RV dealership almost immediately.
The pair said AI can improve dealers’ inventory management, consumer reviews and customer service.
“AI itself is not going to replace dealers,” Marvin said, “but dealers that embrace AI will replace dealers that do not.”
The company uses its AI software, called Rapidious, to obtain inventory information on over 130,000 new RVs on U.S. dealers’ lots.
The goal was to determine which RVs were selling quickly, which were selling slowly and why.
“Once we ran those analyses,” Rajgopal said, “there were shocking and wonderful insights.”
Rajgopal said the data shows that luxury RVs, RVs priced above $100,000, sell at least 10% percent faster than RVs priced below $30,000.
“This is counterintuitive…we did not believe this,” Rajgopal said, “but there is a lot of data to explain this.”
The data also indicates that Midwest dealers keep RVs on the lot an average of 169 days, with an average sales price of $55,986.
On the West Coast, RVs typically sit on dealer lots for 145 days with an average sales price of $61,403. The data is another indication that higher-priced RVs sell more quickly on average.
“Lower pricing is not solving longer turn times,” Rajgopal said. “Supply volume and local demand may be misaligned.”
Marvin and Rajgopal agree that location and local demand are major factors in selling RVs. Their data indicates that RVs in California sell 2.3 times faster than those in Oklahoma.
“Inventory turn improves when brand and price match local buying patterns,” Rajgopal said. “Understanding local market appetite is crucial.”
For insights on consumer reviews, Rapidious analyzed over 10,000 reviews from 2015-2025.
“By leveraging AI, we reveal common complaints and areas for improvement,” Rajgopal said, “helping dealerships enhance service quality and address customer concerns, ultimately driving satisfaction and loyalty.”
The data showed the average customer review was 3.66 out of 5 stars, with 23% of all reviews considered negative, or below 2.5 stars.
“People that leave reviews are generally unhappy; we understand that,” Rajgopal said. “An average rating of 3.66 is OK.”
Rapidious’ data showed that service quality is a driver of customer satisfaction. Only 23.2% of reviews mention price as an issue. Negative reviews mentioned service 2.1 times more often than price.
“Around 40% of one-star reviews are service complaints,” Rajgopal said. “About 38% of all negative reviews mention water leaks, which is about 7 times more than any other single product complaint.”
With AI, he said, dealers can gain more insights into which areas of the dealership can be improved with simple adjustments and which ones require major changes.
Marvin said advanced AI customer service options are already available to save dealers time.
“AI phone agents are a real thing, and we are not talking about these pre-recorded calls where you have to press one for this, two for that,” Marvin said. “This is real, natural language-sounding AI that is quite literally able to handle all your inbound calls…your outbound follow-ups with customers.”
He said AI could also improve digital communication by cleaning up email templates and auto replies.
“AI is going to help you structure [those] in a way that entices more engagement from your lead,” Marvin said. “The idea is to get them to engage with you and convert, and AI is really good at understanding natural language.”
He said AI can help identify top customer leads from information already in the dealership’s dealer management system. AI ranks the leads by intent, engagement and history.
“These are things you can do right now,” Marvin said, “for free.”
With new AI advancements, Marvin and Rajgopal agreed that AI is not what is next for RV dealerships. AI is happening now.
“Dealers who act early,” Rajgopal said, “win early.”
