Intelligent Inventory Merchandising is Live

What It Is

Intelligent Inventory Merchandising uses AI to automatically understand, normalize, and enrich incoming dealer inventory by connecting it to Ekho’s comprehensive vehicle database—powering accurate operations, optimized merchandising, and downstream automation across the vehicle lifecycle, including historically manual workflows like titling and registration. As inventory flows in from dealer systems, our platform intelligently interprets each vehicle and resolves it to the correct underlying definition, even when source data is incomplete or inconsistent. When a vehicle falls outside existing coverage, the system automatically creates a fully merchandised record, ensuring every unit is immediately usable across discovery, purchase, and post-purchase workflows. This work benefits all current and future customers across every Ekho product, including Ekho Dealer, Ekho Omni, and Ekho Access.

Why It Matters

Titling and registering a vehicle requires precise information—engine specs, seat height, weight, emissions data, and more. Historically, matching dealer inventory to these detailed records required significant manual effort, and gaps or inconsistencies in inventory data often caused delays. Intelligent Inventory Merchandising fully automates this process, enabling faster, more reliable titling and registration regardless of what’s on a dealer’s lot.

At the same time, accurate, complete, and expressive inventory data is critical to how vehicles are discovered in the first place. Search engines rely on structured metadata and high-quality descriptions to understand, rank, and surface listings to buyers actively researching specific makes, models, and configurations. By standardizing and enriching inventory data, Ekho ensures vehicles are clearly represented not only on dealer websites, but also in the signals that search platforms use to determine relevance and visibility, helping dealers attract more qualified buyers while shoppers find exactly what they’re looking for.

How It Works

When inventory syncs from a dealer's DMS, our platform leverages an intelligent search system powered by vector embeddings, allowing us to use a variety of inputs from your system, such as vehicle descriptions, images, and identifying details, to perform smart lookups against our own database without requiring rigid data formats or standardized naming conventions. An AI model then confirms the best match.

When no existing record fits, the system automatically indexes the new make, model, and year. It aggregates data from multiple authoritative sources, leveraging a variety of AI models for information gathering, image selection, image enhancement, and processing. The result is a complete, merchandised vehicle definition with all the details required for autonomous titling and registration, added to Ekho's database in real time.

Beyond correctness, we also optimize how each vehicle is merchandised for discovery and conversion. As part of this process, Ekho ensures vehicle metadata is aligned with what buyers actually search for during the research phase—and what we know performs best on search engines. Using aggregated buyer intent signals and search behavior across platforms, we structure titles, attributes, and descriptions to maximize relevance, comparability, and organic visibility, helping vehicles rank higher and resonate more clearly with shoppers.

We also tailor qualitative vehicle content to your specific dealership using AI. Descriptions and highlights are dynamically informed by your Ekho Dealer profile, including your location, the brands you carry, your positioning, and the relative rarity of a given model in your market. Dealers can further customize and update vehicle descriptions directly, ensuring listings reflect both local context and brand voice—while remaining optimized for buyer intent and search performance.

What's Next

This release lays the groundwork for significantly faster and more scalable inventory onboarding as Ekho continues expanding vehicle catalog coverage across segments, brands, and configurations. As the system encounters more real-world inventory, it becomes increasingly capable of understanding edge cases, rare models, and market-specific variants—reducing friction for dealers regardless of what they sell.

More importantly, a complete and intelligent vehicle foundation unlocks a growing set of downstream use cases. For dealers, this means richer merchandising, better discovery across search and marketplaces, faster time-to-list, and less operational overhead as inventory moves from arrival to sale. For Ekho, it enables deeper automation across the vehicle lifecycle—from pricing and incentives to financing, fulfillment, and compliance—while supporting new products that rely on clean, expressive, and continuously improving vehicle data.

Over time, intelligent inventory merchandising becomes the connective tissue between how vehicles are defined, how they’re discovered, and how they’re ultimately transacted, powering a more autonomous, scalable, and performant variable ops OS.