By Isaac Bunick, CEO of MOTORMIA
For decades, innovation in the automotive industry has been driven by engineering breakthroughs, manufacturing scale, and global distribution. Today, however, one of the most consequential shifts is happening more quietly: how automotive products and services are discovered. Powered by artificial intelligence, this shift is beginning to rebalance visibility across the transport ecosystem, and in the process, giving thousands of niche auto manufacturers a new lease on life.
The automotive aftermarket is enormous. A vast universe of parts, accessories, services, and customisation products that support vehicles after their initial sale. Depending on how it is measured, total aftermarket activity can exceed 1.8 trillion USD globally when parts and service labour are combined. Parts alone, including replacement and performance components, are often valued in the 430–500 billion USD range in 2025, with steady growth projected through the next decade. Yet despite its scale, access to this market has long been uneven.
Historically, discovery in the aftermarket has been dominated by advertising budgets, retail partnerships, and search engine optimisation. Large brands naturally rose to the top, while smaller, highly specialised manufacturers, often the most innovative and engineering-led, remained buried in forums, regional markets, or word-of-mouth recommendations. The result was a system where visibility rarely reflected suitability.
AI-led discovery is beginning to change that equation.
Rather than ranking products based on paid placement or brand recognition, modern conversational AI systems evaluate relevance through context. They ask questions a knowledgeable professional would ask: What vehicle is this for? How is it used? What are the performance goals and budget constraints? Only then do they surface recommendations. This represents a fundamental shift from search to dialogue, and from popularity to fit.
I have personally seen the impact of this shift clearly in MOTORMIA, my own company. In 2025 alone, our AI engine drove qualified, high-intent traffic to more than 10,000 aftermarket vendors worldwide. A large share of these were small or niche manufacturers that would almost never surface through traditional Google searches or major online marketplaces.
These companies tend to specialise in very specific solutions: a suspension component optimised for a particular chassis, a cooling upgrade designed for extreme climates, or a safety accessory engineered for a narrow use case. They may not have global marketing teams, but they possess deep technical expertise built over years, or decades, of hands-on experience. AI finally gives these manufacturers a fair opportunity to be discovered by the right customers at the right moment.
This shift is not limited to physical parts. Similar dynamics are emerging across automotive services, including insurance, maintenance, diagnostics, and financing. When AI understands vehicle profiles, usage patterns, and driver behaviour, it can recommend providers that are genuinely better suited to individual needs, rather than defaulting to the most visible or well-advertised brands.
What makes this moment particularly important is that it represents a rare win-win at scale.
Drivers benefit because discovery becomes faster, more intelligent, and more trustworthy. Instead of endless research, conflicting opinions, and generic results, they receive guidance that feels informed and personalised. Manufacturers and service providers benefit because visibility is no longer tied solely to marketing spend. When recommendations are driven by relevance and performance, smaller innovators can compete on merit.
The broader implication for the future of transport is significant. As vehicles become more diverse, across powertrains, software configurations, and usage models, the aftermarket will only become more specialised. AI-driven discovery creates the conditions for this specialisation to thrive, encouraging innovation, improving sustainability through better-matched solutions, and strengthening local and global supply ecosystems.
As conversational AI becomes embedded across transport experiences, discovery itself becomes a strategic layer of the industry. Who gets seen, who grows, and who survives will increasingly be shaped by intelligent systems acting on behalf of users, not advertisers.
In that sense, AI is no longer just optimising transport systems. It is reshaping the economics of visibility, and ensuring that the future of mobility is built not only by the biggest players, but also by the most capable ones.
