Team chat
Direct messages and group chats with your team — without leaving Autopilot.
Most dealerships already have a chat tool — WhatsApp groups, Teams, Slack. Autopilot's built-in team chat isn't trying to replace those, but it gives you somewhere to talk to your team about a deal without context-switching to another app.
Chat in the sidebar, or /chat.
What you can do
- Start a direct message with anyone on your team.
- Start a group chat with three or more people.
- Send messages, react with emoji.
- Link directly to a deal — paste the URL, the chat shows a deal preview card with customer + vehicle + status.
Who can chat with whom
Chat is scoped to your dealership. You can only message people who are also members of the same dealership. If you work at two dealerships, you have two separate chats — you can't message someone at a different dealership through Autopilot.
This is intentional. Cross-dealership messaging would conflate org boundaries and create privacy issues.
Starting a conversation
Click New chat at the top of the chat sidebar. Pick one or more team members. The conversation starts immediately — no invitation step.
Conversations stay in your sidebar until you leave them. Direct messages can't be left (they'd just re-appear when the other person messages you again); group chats can be left from the conversation menu.
Real-time updates
Messages appear in real time when both people have the chat open. If the other person isn't online, they see the message next time they log in (and their unread count badges in the sidebar).
Notifications
By default, you get a small unread badge on the chat icon when someone messages you. Push notifications for chat are coming as part of the broader notification preferences work.
Linking deals into chat
Paste any deal URL into the message box (e.g. https://aplt.ai/deals/abc123). Autopilot replaces the URL with a small deal preview card showing the deal number, customer, vehicle, and current status. Click the card to open the deal.
Useful for "look at this one — needs your eyes":
"Can you check this? They're asking for a $4k discount and I want to clear it before I write up."
[deal preview card]
What's missing
A few things that exist in Slack/Teams that we don't have yet:
- File attachments — text only for now. Paste a deal link instead.
- @mentions with notifications — you can type someone's name but it doesn't currently ping them. Coming.
- Pinned messages / channels / threads — flat conversation only.
- Search — no full-text search of chat history yet.
If your team is heavily chat-driven, you'll keep using your main tool for now. Autopilot chat is the lightweight layer for in-context deal discussion.
Privacy
Your chats are stored in your dealership's private database. Nobody outside your dealership can see them — not other dealerships, not Autopilot staff. We do have technical access for support purposes (debugging delivery issues, restoring lost data), but we don't read message contents in the normal course of business.
If you'd rather not have a sensitive conversation in Autopilot at all, use a different channel — same advice as for any work tool.