As the sports calendar moves into its most crowded stretch of the year, with the MLB postseason opening in the final days of September, a new NFL season already underway, and NHL clubs starting their grinding regular season, sports fans get a yearly reminder of something dealership operators rarely stop to notice.

The franchises consistently competing deepest into the postseason are not simply the ones with the most talented rosters. They are the organizations that resourced the decision-making behind those rosters differently than their rivals.

Front offices are splitting into two camps

Nowhere is that split clearer than in baseball, where front offices have become two distinct workforces: traditional scouts who evaluate talent by watching it, and analytics staff who evaluate it by measuring it.

One National League club recently signaled it plans to add roughly a dozen analytics roles this offseason, explicitly to catch up to rival organizations whose analytics departments are reportedly twice its current size. That is an acknowledgment that instinct alone no longer wins a division, and that the teams pulling ahead are the ones treating data analysis as its own discipline, staffed by people trained specifically to do it, rather than an extra duty assigned to scouts between road trips.

Vehicle acquisition has the same two camps

Car dealerships are further along this same divide than most owners realize, just without the public attention. Every store has people who are excellent at reading a customer across a desk, sensing hesitation, and closing a deal.

Far fewer stores have anyone whose full-time job is deciding, with discipline and data, how many vehicles the store should be acquiring in a given week, from which channels, at what price ceilings, and against what resale risk. That is a fundamentally different skill than sales, closer to the analyst sitting in a front office than the veteran evaluator standing behind home plate with a radar gun.

Treating acquisition as a task any salesperson can absorb on a slow day is the equivalent of asking a scout to also run the analytics department. Both jobs suffer.

AI will not substitute for a missing playbook

The instinct at many stores has been to hand this problem to AI instead of to a qualified person. A recent industry tracking study found that 82% of dealers already report using AI in some form, most often for tasks like customer follow-up and content generation. Yet the same research found a wide gap between expectation and outcome: 69% of dealers using AI expected it to drive sales and revenue growth, while only 22% report actually seeing that result so far. AI can process information quickly, but it cannot supply judgment the organization never built in the first place.

A general manager typing a question into a chatbot is not the same as a trained analyst running acquisition volume through a disciplined, repeatable model. The technology only amplifies whatever playbook already exists. Where no playbook exists, it simply amplifies guesswork faster.

Dealers have already lived through this exact shift

This would not be the first time a dealership function graduated from a side task into its own department. F&I was not always a distinct role. Before 1962, financing was arranged informally by the salesperson who closed the deal, and selling insurance products was not even part of the conversation. That changed when one Chicago area dealer built the first dedicated F&I department, trained specialists to run it, and turned it into what is now one of the most consistently profitable functions in the building.

Industry figures show the average F&I department now contributes about 30% of a dealership’s gross profit, up from roughly 23% three decades ago. Acquisition is following the identical arc: a function once absorbed into someone else’s job description is becoming valuable enough, and complex enough, to require its own dedicated team.

What a buy center actually looks like

The stores adapting fastest are building what amounts to a buy center: a small, dedicated group whose only job is sourcing inventory, measured on its own metrics, running its own weekly numbers, and reporting on volume, cost per unit, and acquisition to sale timelines the way a sales department reports on closing ratios. The people succeeding in that role tend to come from operations, analytics, or data heavy backgrounds rather than the sales floor, for the same reason the top front offices in sports increasingly hire analysts instead of promoting only former players.

Comfort with a customer is not the same skill as comfort with a spreadsheet, and dealerships that keep asking one department to do both jobs will keep getting an average result at each.

October will once again showcase which sports organizations built the right infrastructure behind the roster everyone watches on television. Dealerships have the same choice sitting in front of them, just with less attention paid to it.

The acquisition function is becoming too valuable, and too complicated, to keep treating as a side project. The stores that build a dedicated, analytics minded team around it now are the ones positioned to keep growing while everyone else waits for a hot streak.

Brad Parker is the co-founder and CEO of DealNow.com, a platform transforming how cars are bought and sold between private parties and dealers. DealNow can make every transaction fast, secure, and effortless. Visit www.dealnow.com.