See How AI Agents Can Transform Equipment Lifecycle and Dealership Management

Many of our clients who run equipment dealerships and manage industrial assets throughout their lifecycles are wondering about the potential business benefits of AI and how AI-enhanced software agents could help them serve customers and empower employees. While they are intrigued by the opportunities of AI, they are also curious about best practices that may already be available to ease the path toward agentic AI. In this article, we discuss how AI agents could assist you and how Sikich helps you introduce them into your equipment lifecycle management business. 

Many opportunities for AI improvements in equipment lifecycle management 

Equipment lifecycle management, associated with customer-centric dealership management or within organizations, is a great fit for AI-powered innovation with intelligent agents for two reasons: 

• Equipment lifecycle management relies extensively on data which are essential for training AI, including real-time and historical data streams from equipment connected to the internet of things (IoT).  
• It typically involves complex field service and supporting processes that offer promising opportunities for serving customers more effectively, making employees’ lives easier, and simplifying workflows. 

As we work with clients, we find that intelligent agents can contribute in many ways to equipment lifecycle management. For instance, given proper training and human oversight, an AI agent could manage preventive maintenance. To accomplish this, it would: 

• Set up maintenance schedules based on equipment usage. 
• Create work orders. 
• Schedule technicians. 
• Monitor the inventory of parts and materials. 
• Keep tabs on procurement. 
• Handle invoicing automatically. 
• Tell customers what to expect at what time. 

Another example: In a recent article, we discussed the benefits of integrating an ERP system like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central for Dealer Management with a field service management solution, such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service . A powerful AI agent could rely on this integration to manage not just your field service processes, but assess the performance of technicians to optimize team and skills management or offer recommendations for improvements in industrial design. 

Boosting profitability and streamlining operations 

Intelligent agents could help you maximize the profitable utilization of your rental equipment. They could also assist you in managing your purchasing, inventory, and vendor performance with less effort and greater flexibility and timeliness than humans. 

When it comes to the profitability of equipment, an agent could review equipment bookings together with maintenance costs, technician salaries, and other expenses to determine whether an industrial asset should be part of your rental fleet or if instead it’s to your advantage to sell it. Instead of employees spending many hours analyzing equipment utilization and cost data, you could task an agent with lightning-fast data review and analytics, making sound recommendations as conditions change. That would allow you to make adjustments as soon as the business performance of any type of rental equipment dips. Along the same lines, agents focused on purchasing, inventory, and vendor performance would tirelessly review processes and data. They would never overlook a reorder threshold, vendor delivery schedule, logistics service condition, or customer inquiry 

AI journey from basic task support to intelligent agents 

You can start an AI initiative at your own pace, deploying highly usable solutions that are widely available, such as Microsoft Copilot, and building intelligent agents with comprehensive security safeguards and stringent data governance. Your Sikich team will help you bring this effort to fruition without undue risk and within a realistic timeframe. We have assisted many organizations in taking advantage of today’s leading AI solutions, including the many flavors of Microsoft Copilot AI in Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365, and the Microsoft Power Platform. We can show you how to go beyond basic AI to design AI agents with Microsoft Copilot Studio, workshopping and prioritizing the most promising use cases.  

Depending on your business requirements and goals, we help you create multi-step and more specialized agents, for example, to automatically run processes across diverse technology platforms or to support data analytics and business insight reporting. Keep in mind that intelligent AI agents are not like the chatbots with which most of us have interacted for years. They can function autonomously, yet with complete security, to help people do their jobs, simplify and accelerate certain tasks, or handle routine assignments in a fraction of the time humans require. As workflow agents, AI agents can monitor and direct other, task-focused agents and keep processes moving smoothly and securely, accessing only appropriate resources for clearly defined purposes. 

Focus on business specifics and highly secure 

When we work with you to explore your AI opportunities, we first learn about your business roles and processes. That helps us understand where repetitive tasks stand in the way of productivity, how AI could remove drudgery from your employees’ workloads, or what kind of business questions are difficult to answer. Based on realistic estimates of likely benefits and ROI, you can decide on your top-priority use cases. 

When you start building AI agents in a low-code manner with a tool like Copilot Studio, we help you set the parameters that allow agents to operate securely and access resources only within the scope of their assignments. We make certain that your agents—and the people using them—only have access to the information they need. Working only with data your business owns, agents are restricted from sharing it with any unauthorized parties. 

Sikich will also give your team a running start by sharing best practices for writing natural-language prompts for AI-enhanced agents and apps. This is a skill we will need to master as we bring AI into our working lives. 

Mastering change to make people’s jobs easier 

Empathetic change management and clear communication can make a big difference in how quickly your employees become confident in using AI or relying on support from AI agents. Based on many years of experience in democratizing technology adoption and incorporating change management into transformative technology projects, Sikich helps you unify the workforce in a successful AI initiative. That may uplevel service manager jobs and other roles as AI agents handle increasingly complex tasks. Some employees might be able to take on new responsibilities. As these transformations unfold it’s important that one person or team is responsible for articulating your organization’s overall AI strategy, staying abreast of new developments and helping the business groups grow their AI skills. 

Breakthrough AI innovation without undue risk 

AI agents can help you scale your business without a simultaneous increase in staffing levels or overhead. Created by industry innovation leaders, intelligent agents designed for your industry can run with the reliable performance of standardized solutions. Sikich is familiar with these technologies and can help you deploy them for the best possible outcomes. We perform thorough testing to verify their compliant, secure operation. 

Microsoft is advancing AI innovation with such sophisticated AI agents as a Sales Order Agent and a Payable Agent for Business Central, to be released later in 2025. If you imagine this agent deployed in an equipment dealership, it can review sales email inboxes, find requests for quotes or parts inquiries, and look customers up in Business Central or in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales. It tells customers when their items are available and creates a comprehensive quote for approval by an account manager, including taxes, delivery dates, and other important details. The Sales Order Agent can within minutes perform work that would take a human an hour or more. 

Take the next step to get your AI initiative underway 

AI is likely to transform how people and equipment lifecycle management processes work in your dealership or business group, just like it’s about to do in many other disciplines and business models. Delaying adoption could result in a competitive disadvantage and cause dissatisfaction among employees who hope that AI will help them do their jobs. 

Sikich consultants work with you to realize a successful AI journey, no matter what your starting point is. From working effectively with Copilot assistance, to building simple agents, to creating autonomous or workflow agents, we can complement your team as expert collaborators. We advocate AI that remains completely and securely under human control as it eases your employees’ workloads and gives them more time for valuable work. We also help you model and project the ROI of your AI efforts and control costs under the usage-based Copilot Studio licensing recently introduced by Microsoft. 

To learn more or move forward, you can: 

• Contact us. 
• Consider a Sikich AI Workshop to spur your AI practice. 
• Learn about Sikich data and AI services and the Sikich AI Factory. 
• Find out more about Sikich ERP services and the ERP solutions we support.