Hosted by Farm-Equipment.com / Lessiter Media in late July (Iowa City), we left with clear trends and practical takeaways.
It’s accelerating across dealer and OEM networks. Customer engagement is shifting beyond phone and email toward online self-service, AI-driven workflows, and more precise, targeted advertising.
AI has moved from theory to action. Dealers in construction, agriculture, outdoor power, and commercial vehicles are seeing measurable gains. At the same time, investments and mergers are hastening the end of outdated, siloed systems.
In 2025, the question shifted from “What is AI?” to “How can it fix this?”
Dealers now arrive with specific use cases—addressing technician shortages, improving digital customer engagement, and reconciling inventory with AI. More importantly, AI is helping close the labor gap as dealers recruit less-experienced staff. From completing technician notes to recommending parts, AI provides capabilities that once relied on years of on-the-job experience.
The industry is evolving quickly, and recent moves confirm it:
For Flyntlok customers, Baker Tilly’s acquisition of Sockeye—our long-time implementation partner—brings scale, resources, and deeper ERP expertise, particularly in Sage Intacct deployments.
“Our team is proud to join Baker Tilly — a firm that shares our commitment to innovation, people-first values, and delivering results. This combination enables us to bring our specialized expertise to a broader stage, helping clients around the world implement and optimize the technology they need to grow with confidence.” — Nick Brorson, CEO, Sockeye (read more here)
These moves underscore the demand for modern, cloud-native dealer systems that integrate seamlessly with AI and analytics.
Vista’s acquisition didn’t make the same headlines as Google’s $32B Wiz buyout, but for dealers and mid-market ERP customers it’s just as significant. It signals the end of “good enough” legacy systems and cements cloud-native platforms as the new standard for scalability, security, and innovation.
As analyst Mark Vigoroso put it: “We’re witnessing the great digital transformation reckoning of 2025, where mid-market companies are finally ditching their Frankenstein-esque combinations of QuickBooks, Excel spreadsheets, and prayer circles for actual integrated business management platforms.” Read more on Mark's great analysis on the Cloud ERP Shake-UP.
We see this daily: dealers patch together outdated tools—SMS add-ons, rental apps, spreadsheets, disconnected CRMs—that create silos, confusion, and cost.
As Vigoroso notes, API-first architecture is essential to future-proof ERP investments. Modern integrations improve efficiency, reduce maintenance, and unlock AI and automation.
Flyntlok embraces this approach. We integrate with best-in-class providers for finance, SMS, AI, advanced tax, and real-time analytics. While competitors rely on bolt-ons for basic messaging, Flyntlok has offered native SMS from day one—now extending the same seamless approach to AI via Google Cloud.
Many “cloud” tools are simply legacy systems hosted remotely—fresh UI, old cores. They lack the scalability, integration, and performance true SaaS delivers. With platforms like Flyntlok + Sage Intacct built for dealer and construction workflows, the moat around legacy DMS vendors is disappearing.
From day one, our focus has been on dealer operations, not reinventing the general ledger. We partner with top accounting and AI providers:
Legacy vendors often fail at balancing finance and operations. Flyntlok integrates with market leaders in both.
