Service Advisor · Front of House

Can AI write repair estimates for my service advisors?

Yes, as a draft your advisor presents, never as a message sent to a customer. Auto Advisor's Service Advisor agent scans open repair orders and recent confirmed diagnoses, prices every line with tested code, blocks any draft that misses your gross-profit floors, and uses AI only to write the customer explanation around pricing it cannot change.

Digitally authorized repair orders average about 50% higher value than those approved without documentation. (PartsTech 2025 State of General Auto Repair Shops report, 2024 data.)

Request your Service-Drive Audit

What it does

What does the Service Advisor agent actually do?

Turns open repair orders and fresh confirmed diagnoses into ready-to-present estimate drafts that always protect your margin.

Scans open repair orders and the last week of resolved diagnostic sessions for estimate opportunities, capped at five drafts per run.

Prices every line with tested pure code: labor at your shop's derived historical rate, parts floor-priced off real unit cost.

Blocks any draft that misses the gross-profit floors (40% parts, 60% labor, 50% total, no line below cost) before it is ever queued.

Uses the AI model only to write the customer explanation and talk track around fixed pricing it must copy verbatim; on any model failure a deterministic template ships instead.

Queues every surviving draft for a human to present. It never sends an estimate, in any mode.

What it reads to do the work

Your open repair orders, recent diagnostic sessions, parts, vehicles, and customers
The gross-profit floors (40% parts / 60% labor / 50% total)
The autonomy mode you set for it (defaults to Approve; Off skips the reads and the AI entirely)

How you stay in control

How do I stay in control of what it does?

Every agent runs in the mode you choose, Off, Approve, or Auto, and every agent starts in Approve so a human signs off before anything happens. Here is what Service Advisor can do, with the gate on each action, and the rails that hold in code, not in a policy document.

The actions, and their gates

Queue an estimate draft for your advisor to presentYou approve it
Report drafts blocked by the margin firewallRead-only

The guardrails, held in code

The gross-profit firewall fails closed: a draft below any margin floor, or with a line below cost, is dropped and counted, never presented.
Every dollar figure in the customer copy is copied verbatim from code-fixed pricing; the AI may not invent or alter a number.
Customer names and diagnostic findings are fenced as untrusted data with injection screening.
A per-source, per-day idempotency key, so a same-day re-run queues nothing new.
Five drafts per run caps the AI spend.

What it will not do

What does Service Advisor not do yet?

Every claim on this page maps to shipped, tested code, and the same discipline applies to the limits. Here is where the edge of the product is today, stated plainly, so nothing on your shop rests on a promise.

The labor-margin floor currently checks against a standard $50/hr loaded-cost assumption, not your actual wage data; if your loaded tech cost runs higher, verify labor margin until we tune it with you.
Suggested add-on parts come from your well-stocked inventory and are not yet matched to the specific job, so treat them as a starting point your advisor edits.
Estimate close rate is not tracked from real outcomes yet, so we do not claim one.
It runs when triggered from the dashboard or API, not yet on its own timer.

The numbers it moves

Which numbers does Service Advisor actually move?

Only measured numbers are listed here; a metric the product does not compute does not get claimed.

Average repair order (computed on your Command Center)

Drafts queued, deduped, and guardrail-blocked per run (visible in run detail)

Questions about Service Advisor

Will AI replace my service advisors?

No. In Auto Advisor, every customer-facing artifact is a draft a human presents or sends: the Service Advisor agent drafts estimates with gross-profit floors checked in code, and the Retention agent drafts follow-ups, but your people make the call and take the credit. The point is fewer hours lost to busywork, not fewer advisors. Digitally documented, well-presented work pays: digitally authorized repair orders average about 50% higher value (PartsTech 2025).

Read all 26 questions