April 26-28 | Scottsdale, AZ
In this episode, Brian Pasch sits down with Doug Betts, President of Automotive and Dealer Solutions at JD Power, to explore how the company is transforming from an awards and benchmarking brand into a powerful data and technology partner for dealers. Doug shares how JD Power’s expansive market data, AI initiatives, and dealer-focused solutions are helping retailers reduce operational waste, improve service diagnostics, optimize inventory ordering, and make smarter F&I decisions. If your dealership is looking to modernize operations and leverage deeper market intelligence, this conversation reveals why JD Power should be on your radar.
In this episode, Brian Pasch sits down with Doug Betts, President of Automotive and Dealer Solutions at JD Power, to discuss the company’s evolving role in automotive retail. While many dealers know JD Power for vehicle awards and benchmarking, Doug explains how the organization has transformed into a data-driven technology company focused on helping dealers eliminate waste, improve profitability, and make smarter decisions across the dealership.
Doug explains that JD Power’s benchmarking and awards business now represents only a small portion of the company’s total operations. The majority of JD Power’s focus today is on transaction data, predictive analytics, and dealer technology solutions that support OEMs and retailers with real-world decision making.
One of JD Power’s core missions is helping dealers identify waste across their operations. By analyzing broad market and transaction data, the company can surface inefficiencies in inventory mix, pricing, sales process, F&I performance, and fixed operations—then provide tools to help dealers improve those areas with data-backed guidance.
JD Power is developing tools that help dealers better understand which vehicle configurations perform best in their market. Rather than stocking inventory based on instinct or OEM guidance alone, dealers can use transaction and market data to identify which trims, packages, and configurations turn fastest and generate the strongest gross profit in their region.
Doug shares how JD Power is leveraging repair order and warranty data to build predictive AI tools for service departments. By analyzing historical repair patterns and matching technician notes against known repair outcomes, JD Power aims to help dealers diagnose issues faster, reduce technician discovery time, and improve fixed ops throughput.
JD Power currently has repair data on roughly one quarter of all vehicles serviced in the United States. This data has been normalized across OEMs, labor operations, and repair terminology—creating a powerful benchmark dataset that can be used to improve service recommendations, repair accuracy, and OEM warranty analysis.
Doug explains that JD Power is actively improving Darwin and its F&I product suite by integrating more of the company’s underlying market and consumer data. The goal is to help dealers present more personalized, relevant offers to customers—improving F&I penetration and expanding the lower funnel where many dealers lose profit opportunities.
JD Power is also rolling out new workflow solutions designed to reduce friction in dealership operations. These include tools for faster trade payoff/title processing, identity verification, fraud detection, and synthetic identity prevention—all aimed at helping dealers move vehicles through the sales process faster and more securely.
Doug notes that many dealers are overwhelmed by today’s fragmented vendor landscape and overlapping technologies. JD Power’s strategy is to build cleaner, more connected solutions that simplify dealership workflows and provide dealers with more confidence in the data driving their decisions.
One of Doug’s biggest priorities is helping dealers understand where they stand relative to top-performing peers. By exposing performance gaps through industry-wide benchmarking, JD Power aims to help dealers identify the areas where the greatest profit and operational improvements can be made.
Doug concludes by emphasizing that JD Power’s long-term vision is to power every automotive decision with better data. From inventory planning to fixed ops diagnostics to F&I optimization, the company is focused on giving dealers clearer direction and stronger confidence in every operational decision they make.
