Protecting your Dealership in the age of AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing dealership operations — from automating workflows to enhancing decision-making. But as organizations accelerate AI adoption, they also face a growing wave of security risks. For dealer principals and IT leadership, managing these risks is no longer optional — it’s mission-critical.

The Rising Tide of AI-Driven Threats

AI’s dual-use nature means it can be both a powerful defense tool and a potent weapon in the hands of attackers. According to Trend Micro, in 2025, 93% of security leaders expect daily AI-driven attacks, and 80% of enterprise CISOs cite AI-powered threats as their top concern, up from fifth place just a year ago.

These threats range from deepfake phishing campaigns to automated vulnerability exploitation. Attackers are leveraging generative AI (GenAI) to craft convincing fraud schemes, scaled social engineering attacks, and bypass traditional defenses with alarming speed and realism.

Key AI Security Risks

• Adversarial Attacks — AI models can be manipulated with subtle data tweaks, causing misclassification or system failures. These attacks are increasingly common in image recognition, fraud detection, and autonomous systems.
• Data Poisoning — AI systems learn from data. If attackers inject malicious data into training sets, they can corrupt model behavior. This is especially dangerous in systems that retrain on live data.
• Model Theft and IP Exposure — AI models represent valuable intellectual property. Without proper safeguards, they can be stolen, reverse-engineered, or cloned—exposing proprietary algorithms and sensitive data.
• Specific Risks from Generative AI — According to the 2025 Thales Data Threat Report, nearly 70% of organizations identify the fast-moving GenAI ecosystem as their top security concern, followed by lack of integrity (64%) and trustworthiness (57%).
• AI Infrastructure Vulnerabilities — Recent findings from the Pwn2Own hacking competition revealed 28 zero-day vulnerabilities, including seven targeting AI systems like Chroma DB and NVIDIA Triton Inference Server. These exploits highlight the risks of deploying AI without rigorous security vetting.

5 Strategic Steps for Dealer Principals & IT Leaders

To manage these risks effectively, dealer and IT leaders should adopt a proactive, layered approach to AI security:

1. Secure Your Data: Protecting the integrity of data is critical. Use access controls, encryption, and validation checks to prevent unauthorized data access and manipulation. Consider synthetic data or federated learning approaches to reduce exposure to sensitive information. Additionally, ensure that the data in your business systems, CRM, POS and other tools that manage your customer, financial, and operational data doesn't leak into public generative AI applications. "Data Leakage" must be avoided for all sensitive data sets.
2. Integrate AI into Your Dealership's IT Governance: AI security should be part of your broader IT governance strategy. Establish clear policies for model development, deployment, and usage. Additionally, your IT team should have a sound set of policies and procudures for monitoring and managing AI tools across systems and data environment. Include AI-specific risk assessments and pen tests for AI apps in your security audits to ensure IT security and compliance excellence.
3. Implement Robust Model Monitoring: AI models should be continuously monitored for performance and anomalies. Use tools that can detect adversarial inputs, drift in model behavior, and unexpected outputs. Logging and alerting mechanisms should be in place to flag suspicious activity. For those dealerships that use cloud products to manage the day-to-day operations, make sure your vendors have robust model monitoring and remediation policies in place.
4. Collaborate Across Teams: AI security isn’t just an IT issue; it's a dealership issue. It involves governance, legal, IT team members, vendors, technology partners, and your dealership's business leaders. Collectively, we must foster cross-functional collaboration and policy management to ensure that security is embedded throughout the AI lifecycle both internally and throughout your dealership's technology supply chain.
5. Stay Ahead of the new AI Threat Landscape: AI threats are evolving rapidly and can materially impact your dealership and its operations. As technology leaders we need to keep abreast of known challenges and exploits. More importantly, we need to also educate our teams, co-workers, partners and technology vendors on these threats to drive continuous awareness and compliance.

What's a Dealership to Do? Build a Resilient AI Security Strategy

Managing AI security risks is not about avoiding AI — it’s about using it responsibly. With the right strategy, dealership principals can harness the power of AI while protecting their organizations from emerging threats. This means investing in secure infrastructure, fostering a culture of vigilance, and continuously adapting to the new challenges AI creates.

AI is here to stay. The question is not whether to use it, but how to use it safely. This starts with understanding the risks — and leading the charge to mitigate them.