AI in Automotive Retail: Jarrod Kilway on the Next Big Shift

In this episode of Word on the Street, we sit down with Jarrod Kilway, VP of Digital Operations at Casa Auto Group, to explore how AI is reshaping dealership operations. From training GPT agents to pull real-time insights from the DMS and CRM, to automating marketing campaigns and service outreach, Jarrod shares how dealers can use AI to cut inefficiencies, boost profitability, and deliver a better customer experience.

We also dive into zero-click search, voice technology, and what the next wave of disruption could mean for automotive retail. Whether you’re a dealer, marketer, or just curious about how AI is changing the industry, this conversation is packed with forward-looking strategies and practical takeaways.

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Transcript

If I wanted to hear from an insanely seasoned marketing pro, it's a marketing director right now of a dealer group. He's worked at the manufacturer side. He's worked on the vendor side. Now he's working with a dealer group and doing some pretty innovative things with AI and has a good head on his shoulders for some creative ideas to really sell vehicles. I would listen to this conversation if I were you. This is Jared Kilway. I'm Andrew Street. This is Word on the Street. Enjoy this conversation.

Did you see the news about nissan no is it today yeah about about an hour ago they are going to roll out their first plug-in hybrid here in q-four so okay it's interesting to see them kind of pivot change they were all in on ev with the leaf and the aria now they're going back now they're doing plug-ins as we were saying, everybody's probably looking at Toyota's success with the lineup of hybrids that they've got and like, okay, let's do that too. It's like when, you know, five years too late. Yeah. It's like when an NFL team sees Michael Vick, they're like, we need one of those guys. So they all tried to replicate him for a while. No, it'll be interesting to kind of see that if it's like, who's next, who's next on a pivot and kind of run that, that same angle. Well, Toyota announced the thousand mile solid state battery sometime last week. I don't know if it's going to actually hit the market, but sounds cool. Hey. Thousand miles is a lot of miles. I would say that's that's insane. If you think about it, then. That's a really crazy. statement of a thousand mile solid state battery how do you I mean how do you how do you how do you how do you deal with it now what's the fire risk behind it because totally that's what I was thinking like is it even more fire that is it three times as much fire as your three hundred mile does it just smoke or does it just explode are you working with nissan stores I have two yeah how are they doing nissan's great they're they're in a growth mode from an oem perspective but they're really great to work with um they're just trying to figure out the next what's the next five years look like and how can they best assist us as dealers and you know I think they're moving in the right direction there's still a lot to to grow and learn um but I think you know they genuinely care and they want to succeed and they're really good at communicating so I'm actually going to be uh with them next week at dealer meeting in vegas so cool yeah I'm a believer in the brand and same with cdjr they've made some moves lately to get kind of back to their roots and away from the ninety thousand dollar ram and evs and kind of hit the hemi's yeah and then it's but it's like you're switching to the like the challengers to a six cylinder like that's not what The challenger buyer wants, you know, they want that raw unfiltered VA. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's what they're buying that car for. I mean, you, you go back and look at. Two thousand. Three, two thousand four, two thousand five, really for the Stellantis brand. And they were hurting from like ninety nine to oh five. They're hurting pretty bad. Cars breaking down all the time. You know, just the two seven sludge motors. I mean, it was it was a tough, tough time for them. But then you look, it's like, OK, oh, five. They came out with a new version of the three hundred. They came out with the charger and six. They put the V eight in it. They won the people back. Then they came out with the Wrangler four door in two thousand and seven. What people have been asking for forever and just a whole new caravan and town and country van. But we're asking for with newer tech and features and they rebounded extremely, extremely well. because they went back to their roots of who they are as a brand as a core stop trying to be everybody else and focus on being what your buyers lean on you for and I think that's a great business lesson not even just for for them just for everybody like don't worry about what joe blow ford dealers doing down the street focus on your core your culture and who you are and your customers yeah and you'll succeed yeah focus on your customers more than your competitors the competitive brands easier said than done sometimes it's like nissan I remember in high school nissan was the coolest like if there's any car I probably could get and I had any choice in high school I would have gotten a maxima because it's the four-door race car And then they nailed it with the Xterra. And now they're looking for that next placement to get back in front of us. I'm excited to see what some of these manufacturers' five-year rollout is going to be in terms of brand and the tech. And are they going to go back to basics and back to the roots? That's been proven to be successful. Yeah. Well, something that, hey, when we talked last week, you mentioned something that I think is super interesting. I've brought up with a couple of other people. And it's training GPT based agents to be able to filter and pull data from your DMS for your stores. Can you tell me a little bit about that experience, about setting it up and what dealers are able to pull up? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, AI and if you if you want to know about AI, just turn on the stock market watch right now and just watch AI stocks exploding where everybody else is kind of status quo. Um, but for me, it's the application to solve not inefficiencies, but how can I save my GM's time? How can I save owner's time? How can we do these things? Um, deal with it so it's incorporating ai agents into integrations to pull data so example I want to grow fixed ops by fifteen percent between now and end of year where are my opportunities where are my zip codes that people have service but have not service where's my declines opcodes coming from, is a specific location, whatnot. And then it comes down to utilizing all of this data from a marketing perspective, an outreach perspective, and an overall awareness. But it's, I mean, you could sit there and have this do thousands of different things based upon your need. Oh, I need to sell fifteen new centers between now and the month. where is the highest probability to sell a Sentra into in El Paso, New Mexico? What city? What demographic? Based upon our historical sold data, not based upon anything else other than our transactional data of who is buying this car from us. So for me, it's really exciting because it can kind of guide our marketing spending, our marketing dollars to be more effective and efficient. Am I going to miss some because I target a specific? Absolutely. But if I know I'm batting seventy percent on a right handed pitcher and the same guys batting ten percent on a left handed pitcher, don't you think it's time to put it a pinch hitter to be effective and efficient? It's the same logic. So are you Uh, like empowering the GMs to be able to pull this information themselves. Like, are they actually logging in, pulling up? That's, that's, uh, that's two point aversion. I'm building transactional prompts for them right now. So I've got it integrated and I'm starting to work on different prompts of different questions that we get quite frequently so that it's, uh, It's pulling the right information so they can have a library of twenty, thirty different prompts they may need to see and pull. And then I'm going to start turning it loose to them here next year. So what are some like so they could pull up these audiences, potentially export the list hand off to sales people bdc uploading to social for targeting it'll do it automatically that does it automatically so that's where it comes fun it's like I want a marketing campaign for service For my Ford mobile service van, people who have service but are outside a ten-mile radius, inside a forty-mile radius, that live in this zip code, and I want to send a message to them, to Target, because I already have a scheduled mobile service appointment, but it's only one. I want five. I can rip that audience and deploy a campaign right then and there the previous week. rather than, to your point, uploading, taking a list, ripping a list, uploading a list, I can make the data actionable in live time through the GPT agents. And the GPT will create the message, do the outreach. It'll do everything, and then it's just to call the agency, hey, review, here's the audience, here's the campaign structure, here's the spend. I need you guys just to review, make sure everything, T's crossed, I's dotted, compliance for the manufacturer, execute. With the cool, there's like such a good metric on like, what is our retention rate for our customers? And if it's, you know, a, just to know it and what can we do to, to really employ our CDP and our D like our DMS and these things that we have access to, to be able to really leverage our own database and make our messaging more relevant to our customers. And if there's people like you that can help grease the skids to generate those messages and get them to people when it's timely for the dealer, like when it's timely because the dealer has capacity in the service department or with the mobile service or because they have a lot of a specific vehicle and inventory and they need to push it here by the end of the month. to have that surface those ideas quickly. It was just amazing. Like, are there, are you finding ways to like have, whether it's the general manager or just you in the marketing role to come up with ideas for the dealer that wouldn't have come up easily without using AI? It started about a year ago, actually. And where we're at in West Texas, New Mexico, and now Arizona is our key location in El Paso. You think El Paso, you don't think EVs, right? So it's an oil town. You're right there from Midland, Odessa. You would never think EV when you think El Paso. So doing research, and this is before all the agents were even set up and running, I looked at historical sales data and talking to Junior, the GM, and Mike, our marketing director, we had to find a way. We had to find a way to do it. came up with consumer sediment analysis of EVs in said market. So we started ripping all this data from dealer radar, Reddit, and it parses all this data and it's like, I've never driven one. I don't know how it feels. So trying to sell something that somebody has never driven before, it's hard. I mean, that's extremely, extremely difficult. So at that point, we knew we had to get butts and seats we had to get people behind the wheel to get that experience so we launched our take-home test drive campaign for evs so never driven one before want to drive one want to see what it's like sure come by the store come take it for the day it'll be fully charged you don't have to worry about recharging Come take the car for the day. The only thing that we're going to ask you at the end of this, when you do bring it back, is the five questions to let us know what you liked, what you didn't like, what were your concerns, how the drive was, et cetera. So we're gathering intel, we're gathering data so that we can be more effective and efficient to the new EV customers who have never driven one that are now driving one. Now I know how to market to them. Now I know what the concerns are, what they like the most. And we were able to really put that in motion and succeed with it. I mean, they're doing that message out, inviting specific people or inviting just the public to come in and take it, take a vehicle home. Yeah, so the medium of delivery was OTT, paid social, as well as de-anonymization targeting through the M-One Pixel. We were able to target that, but it really also on a geolocation basis of charging locations. So we looked at charging locations, where are chargers to, and then highlighted people who excluding the people who already own one, but we know a charging EV charging stations close to them. So that range anxiety becomes something of the past because we can say, Oh, there's one, three mil, three miles down the road from you. You're all set. You're good to go. So what we found was people loved it. They want to drive it. They were just never given that opportunity. So when you get them behind it, driving it, they really started like, oh, this is cool. This has actually got a lot of power and all this amazing technology. And people still really started embracing and adopting that. And that Kia store in El Paso became one of the top ones in the district, in the state for EVs, competing with stores near you there, Austin area, that's EVs thriving. El Paso's getting their fair share of market set because we're introducing EV as a shopping behavior and removing all friction. Yeah. It's like a lot of stores that I've worked with that are in other markets or they're especially like in rural areas are like, don't talk, don't even like when I bring up EV, like I'll talk with, with like Trent Cannon who, who connect the dots with you and I is like, you know, talk about Maki leasing and things like that. And then I'll bring it up with dealers like, Hey, let's go out in front of people and educate them about the limited time remaining on the EV tax credit, how much money they're going to be able to save and OEM incentives with the zero percent finance. And they're like, stop, just stop, stop talking about EVs. We don't sell them. We sell, we sell one a quarter at the highest like clip. Like we were trying not to take EVs from the manufacturer. Like, And if there's a way for us to tap into their markets, they've got like this is somebody I was talking to in San Antonio. They've got a few million people for us to be able to try this out with. Yeah. And if it's like get the general manager on board, they already have the inventory. And if we can get somebody into the test drive and go home with it. And get some feedback. That could be a way to tap into a new... Did you find a type of audience close to an EV supercharging station or whatever? Initially, but it changed. That was the weird part. Initially, we started seeing people who had superchargers close to them, but it evolved. It cast a wider net as there became more on the road. It came down to people who look at cars as transportation. people who, you know, income ranges of A to B, age demographics, everything, we were able to identify that specific market set to it that's the highest propensity to buy, or at least come in and drive it. And now we're seeing a change as there's more on the road, more coming out there, more EVs are out there, more and more people are to it. But the funny thing behind this entire exercise Is this is EVs? Yes. Why are we not doing this for ice? Why are we not doing this for our, you know, bread and butter that we're doing every single day? Why would we not invite the customer in and, Hey, I'm looking at F one, great. Have you driven one before? No. Hey, come pick one up, take it for the day. Why are we not giving that experience to those customers? We've done like I've had some success with that in the past. And it's not just like in my experience, like what we found is like not just broadcasting that to everybody who wants to get a free car for a day, but to just let's hold on to just targeting people who've maybe bought a vehicle from us in the past. Or they've come by and at least looked at our vehicle detail pages in the last month. And let's get people who are shopping that could turn into a potential customer and get them to drive the vehicle. Or tag the person below that you want to take with you when you take this car on a test drive. And then the dealer can be a little bit more, hopefully, selective. And that person's probably more qualified when they come in to transition into a customer. That's the hope. yeah but it's do but we don't as an industry I don't know anybody currently that's offering that option hey you want to buy one no problem you're you're a lead you want to come take one for the day come by and grab one sure yeah it's easy for us to hit the easy button as marketers and be like here's the incentives go you know and here's inventory here's prices automate automate and not think about what's the message And what would actually compel somebody to want to choose us over anybody else? Well, that's where I see the evolution changing for the industry, being that hospitality centric focused and the ones that are the most hospitable, both on sales and service. At the end of the day, they're going to win because every single day you and I included are guilty of spending more on a product than it is somewhere else. We do it every day. We don't talk about it every day because the experience we received exceeded the other one with the lowest price. But we don't talk about that as well. You look at the Chick-fil-A versus McDonald's. Consistency of the food, the taste of the food, everything's consistent. The experience is consistent and everybody's going to say, my pleasure. You don't know what you're going to get at McDonald's when you go through that line. Everything's going to be a little bit different, but it's going to be a chicken sandwich is a chicken sandwich. You're going to end up paying a dollar fifty, two dollars less McDonald's to Chick-fil-A. But we pay more for consistency and and hospitality and at the end of the day experience. So how do we incorporate that into setting ourselves apart as dealerships and branding this to making the customers aware of here's all the value adds, here's all the benefits and here's what we offer. Yeah. I, dude, I like to think that there's a way. When everybody just doing, you know, just on social, like automotive inventory ads, just carousels of your inventory of stock images with prices, we're really commoditizing the dealership as they have cars and here's how much they cost. and get ready to negotiate on that price versus having a little bit of effort to getting somebody like a somebody with a little charm or charisma to show the cool features in this ev or show the new sweet features in the twenty twenty six versus this old broke model that you're driving and then target people who are driving those vehicles And here's the difference. Here's why you need to step up to the twenty twenty six. It's because it has these cool features, the, you know, lane departure or whatever, you know, have the reclining seats, the ventilated seats now and these little tiny features that that dealership can every other every other dealership that has that inventory has those same features. But we're the dealership that's taking credit for these cool features and products that the manufacturer is coming out with. And setting us apart to where now we have video assets and cool things that resonate with customers more than just cars and price. So you talked about basically like an Ask Jeeves version of GPT into a dealer's DMS. Well, it's DMS, but it's also CRM. I mean, you can load anything to it. I mean, it's not just DMS data. You can pull CRM data. You can incorporate your AdWords data, your Meta Business Manager data, your analytics, everything. You're accounting. You can put your P&L statements in there and get a quick diagnosis of red flags and areas of opportunity. finance what's your contract in transits I mean broken down by line I mean there's it's endless of what you can do with it on an operational element it just it's going to come down to what do we do with the data outcome how do we train the team to take precedence of what's important what's urgent and acting on urgence and then working through important you know items that are come about come out from you know the ai agent so it's it's not just the easy bake oven set it forget it look at all this and this is going to change your dealership overnight because we have to change the awareness of the end user who's going to be made aware of a problem or an opportunity and put it in motion. And OK, so that makes me think like. There's I think it's like lower hanging fruit for dealers to start using platforms to quickly respond to or use AI to quickly respond to leads. to potentially like facilitate a conversation with a customer that might be a little bit more informed than an entry-level sales person. Are you seeing some success in like empowering a BDC or in times like replacing people in the BDC? Yeah, yeah, we're using it and it's not, it's not a replacement. We'll never be able to replace the human side or element of the operation, but what it, provides efficiency to is the redundancies and mundane tasks of follow-up. Day thirty-one, there's an active lead from thirty-one days ago, call, text, email. He's never engaged with us. He's never talked to us. Is that human capital investment of that time to do that task worth it? I would say no. Utilize AI to do that as well. So it's using AI to incorporate initial contact and then longer term follow up. and having the people who know the cars, know the process, know the operation, having them jump in when contact is made, and really using AI as that facilitator for awareness and engagement, and then having the store be really effective and efficient with that opportunity presented to them that, hey, this customer responded, they're interested in finding out what their car is worth before they agree to come down to the store. perfect it's just a to right there it's just in the digital format what do you feel like is like the easiest way for a dealer who's not really leveraging any of this stuff yet to get started test it break it figure out what what's the sentiment of your team if you mention it so mention your saturday morning meeting ask everybody hey what's your thoughts on ai we're looking at maybe adding an AI solution what's everybody's thoughts take the temperature of the team before you just add because if you don't have the temperament to be able to handle it you're going to have a lot of revolting and pushback it's like oh the AI said something wrong to the customer that's going to happen but we don't go posterize the BDC or sales rep who completely butchers a conversation too. We don't talk about those instances, but it's learn from it and let it learn from us to make it even better as we continue to grow and train those language models for your operation as a store. What's cool about this, I feel like it's not reaching deep into the dealer's pockets to sign up for shiny vendor products at this point. You're not talking about anything with vendors. It's about the dealership being able to use tools themselves. And it's because the consumers are already using them. And you know this from the marketing side of things. And I was... Just pulling some stuff up earlier today. One of my favorite daily morning coffee breaks is going reading through search engine land. What the heck is going on there? And something I've been studying now for about three months and now it's starting to even get better visibility. It's the zero click search. So as more and more consumers are utilizing AI themselves we have to be open to utilize an AI to help answer basic simple questions, give an answer, and get them engaged to a point to turn to a live human at the store to take it to the next step of providing them a video walk around, giving them options. Do they want to come in and drive it? Do they want us to bring them the car? Do they want to do the deal remote? And giving the consumer the options to pursue the deal the way they want. And when we do that, we're finding... thirty five to forty percent more engagement versus oh you got to come in to get the best deal or you have to bring your car here to get you know the best offer just ask them what they want to do I mean if we look at the top business from a sales model right now look at amazon look at apple Look at these, you know, shoot, go look at target even. I mean, they've mastered it. They've mastered it. It's how do you want to buy? Do you want to deliver? How fast? Or, Hey, do you want to not deliver this from target, but you just want to pull in the parking lot and punch a six digit code and somebody brings it out to you. That's an option now too. So other businesses have already incorporated the logic where I'm talking about for that consumer behavior, but we haven't. Yeah. I mean, there's some dealers who are, they're seldomly advertising it though, but there's a hungry salesperson that'd be willing to drive a couple of hours to bring somebody a vehicle, having prearranged the trade in and handle the deal right there at the customer's kitchen table and drive off in that, their old vehicle. Yeah. And it's a pleasant experience for the customer. yeah but is it presented a hundred percent how many opportunities do you have every month that don't know that that exists and that's where the marketing rather than we talk about oh eighteen thousand off msrp on right twenty five model vehicle If we just educated them on, hey, do you know you can buy a car from your living room? Do you know you can just go ahead and do everything and then just come to the store and everything's done? Or we'll even bring it to you. I think more people would be like, oh, that's kind of like that used car company, Carvana. Oh, wow, our local store's doing similar process to them. Right, with new cars. And like, I don't know, like I've been something I've been working with with some, some of the dealerships around me is like just, uh, interviewing their staff to hear about like, what's the most, uh, enjoyable experience you had selling a car, how the customer feel, how did they react? What's the coolest feature and some of this stuff to get cool content, but also a lot of the staff will start talking about the philanthropic stuff that they do, how they love the work environment. How many people work there that live in the community? And it's a way I like to think from the advertising side that we can talk about all these philanthropic things that they're doing to raise money for charities and with the schools and with backpacks for kids without the dealer just taking credit for it. It's their staff talking about how cool it is that they're part of it. and how that makes them enjoy their job more. And we can use that for recruiting. We can use that just as branding, not to jump through and fill up my credit app this second. But here's why we go to this local dealership versus a Tesla or Carvana, because this is your community and here's what they do for our community. hundred percent and we're at casa we're blessed to have uh you know mike our marketing director yeah he's great with that I mean he exceeds with the community he knows the community there in el paso new mexico um and he's very well connected and you know we've got him doing and he's him and his team are doing it every month now and it's a capasa casa and it's just highlights from the previous month and it's on youtube it's on our social channels for every store uh we've been including this into email campaigns that's just going out to everybody who's bought or serviced a car it's not a marketing message it's just hey here's kind of like the old school newsletters, but it's in video format of, hey, this is what's going around to Casa. We were in this golf tournament. We did this for Make-A-Wish. We just sponsored this local athlete or whatever it may be for this month. They're very involved with the military base and the big give they just did a couple weeks ago. It's a lot of fun and it's a lot of just real authentic hospitality but it's just it's the community it's just serving the community and to your point that's that's something a lot of just I think dealers are missing out on they do a lot but they don't talk about it so it's hard it's delicate it's it's not like a that's not why we're doing it we're not doing it for the advertising or the marketing necessarily we're doing it because it's our community and We have a budget for it and we've identified these few things that are meaningful to us and to our community. I don't want to advertise it, but if there's a tasteful way that at me as the advertiser can tap into somebody else talking about it, about why they love it. I feel comfortable advertising that now. It's just the awareness. yeah um and even if it's just your audience that have bought and serviced with you just keeping them aware of it yeah knowing what they're part of yeah absolutely so did you okay can we talk about vc stuff for a minute yeah vc stuff yeah a couple times yeah you've been on all sides of the desk vendor side dealer side and oh yeah yeah where's the grass the greenest um where you're happy you know it comes down to being being happy you know I've I've been on the vendor side and had a lot of fun and it's always fun building stuff yeah and building stuff didn't see any results for it but then uh you know it's also fun to see where I'm at now with casa as a part of the day-to-day and seeing where the struggles are and what pieces can be fixed with different technical elements that maybe dealers are never exposed to um the oem side is a blast because you can kind of see the trend line in the future of five years it's not next month um future it's five year future and you can kind of see what the path is that the oems are starting to go down like we talked about earlier with nissan so I mean I don't have a favorite I don't have a favorite it's just being happy I mean because oem was fun but as long as you don't mind living out of a suitcase you'll enjoy it if you had a family it's it's hard been there done it check that box you know uh it was a lot of fun but the travel is is extensive um the vendor side is very similar it's you're managing different time zones, which is always fun. For you, if you had a client in Hawaii, six hour time difference, five hour time difference, I mean, that can be difficult to ensure that that client's getting the attention they need. because of the time change. So it becomes an additional obstacle. So you may not be living out of a suitcase, but you also might be working sixteen, eighteen hours a day to accommodate that client, too. And then it's the other dealer side, it's as I mentioned, you have your day to day struggles, your day to day challenges, trying to move a cruise ship and drive it like a speedboat. And it changes every single month and trying to figure out what's next, what's coming. But for me, it's just trying to focus on those three or four really important things for a quarter to get executed and then operate daily with the day-to-day basic blocking tackling. I find it healthy to like... zoom out and look at it quarterly like it's something that I feel like we don't do is with a lot of dealerships is look at it on a larger basis than like hey here's the incentives let's crush some leads how okay the leads suck are you guys you know like this game of of trying to transact today is important and we gotta continually put urgency out there for customers to to know that now's the time to buy and here's why while being able to say like, hey, here's a long-term play. It's not going to generate leads or credit apps today, but here's this thing I want to do to educate consumers around the dealership and start to get them into the top of the funnel and get the dealer to buy in too and say, yes, that's important. I can see why that's important. And let's not put all of my budget into it whatsoever, but I'll put some in there. let's test it test experiment break rebuild I mean that's the cyclical behavior of any effective operator and lasering into those three things I mean you look at what elon has created within tesla in the time frame he has it's to your point he's focusing on his three or four or five items each quarter and he is just making sure those are being executed there's a lot of noise and this and well what if we did this so what if we do that great let's put this down for the next quarter planning but right now these are the these are the five that we have to execute now if one of these is more important one of these we need to sit there and vote on it and ensure we can meet deadline yeah and I mean that's kind of business operation that you know I think we all should be leaning in a little bit more towards rather than looking at it from a you know a thirty day cyclical element we need to start looking at from a quarterly or you know semi-annual component like if you're not working right now in in middle of august if you're not working on your budget and marketing plan for twenty twenty six, you're already behind some of the bigger ones in the space. At least building your budget out from a rough blueprint so that you during your Q three recap or Q four planning, you can sit there and have everything line item done for twenty twenty six, whereas a lot of people are like, what are we going to do in September? And it just shows the vast differences between a lot of the stores that are in operation today. And I like to think somebody like you, Jared, that has a formative experience with manufacturer, with vendors and at the dealerships, like to be able to have seen a lot of things that worked well and start to build out just like an arsenal of ammunition based on what the dealership needs. and things that are down in the future and cool new tech and platforms and stuff. But like, okay, this dealership is having trouble with recruiting here. They're always needing text and they have here's some things that I can do from the marketing end to help stimulate more job applications. Or you guys have a lot of Spanish buyers. Here's a way that I think we can unlock WhatsApp and start driving conversations through WhatsApp. Can you guys handle the conversations? Okay. You can't here's a substitution for the BDC right now until you guys are equipped that we're going to use this, you know, near shore BDC that uses, you know, things like this from your end that you can see all the, the profit centers at the dealership and what you can do from your end to help from a remote location in Florida and dealerships are in Texas, Mexico and be effective for the stores. From the vendor side, what do you feel like is overhyped right now versus actually delivering? Shoot. I mean, it's so... I just see it changing really from the vendor side. I just see a lot of growth and change and a lot of companies that have been very successful inside automotive that are bigger ones that are slower to change. The fear is because of new technology, new ways of operating, AI, et cetera. if they don't pivot quickly, they may be caught behind the times very, very quickly and new technology and dealer and manager at dealerships willingness to evolve. They might not be able to keep up with that evolution and kind of get lost, which if we look back and rewind the tape on the industry, this isn't the first time we've been through this. yo, I'm gonna age myself here very quickly and we can have a good shuffle. But do you remember when CRMs were server-based? Do you remember autobase as a CRM back? You know, we're talking late nineties, early two thousands and web-based CRMs came out. They stayed true to that line. And now everybody started migrating towards web-based. haven't heard the name autobase I don't know if they're still around um but you think of that that evolved and they never evolved to keep up with the evolution same thing with aax aax was one of the the industry pioneers from an inventory management system with used car pricing and evaluations and everything they were there and then all of a sudden it was like poof they were gone one day So we've seen where we're at right now inside the automotive sector. I just see now opportunity for some newer companies to come in and be extremely disruptive if some of these legacy companies don't start evolving very quickly. What innovations do you really, what are really attractive on the vendor side for you? Integrations? Integrations are key. I mean, because what we've talked about with my GPT agents, yes, I can do it, but. Ninety five percent of dealers probably don't have somebody who can go. Run an API piping to. An agent from their systems. It's when does a smart CRM or DMS or inventory management company come out with that pre-built element that, hey, if you're running an AI agent, click here and you can build the integration yourself. That's a one-way API from this host to your end destination and build upon it. So they make it easier for, the everyday used car manager to go build an assessment of how his vehicles perform with a clean Carfax versus a Carfax with an accident indicator based upon profitability and days to sale. That could be something that could be piped in very quickly to a GPT agent to assess that data and be able to give that used car manager better direction on a strategy for cars that do have a bad car fax. But we need tools to open that connection because right now they're just going to an inventory management tool, exporting data and uploading it to a Bard or a Gemini or a Chad GPT and using it that way. But in process, they're potentially exposing extremely valuable data to outside network, whereas you have your own agent and now your data is secure. How much heavy lifting was it for you to set up these agents with your stores? It was about... You and YouTube and... No. No, I knew the integration side with API construction, so that to me was very... It wasn't too difficult. It was just then setting up... the right queries and the right prompts and measuring the results that return, you know, a lot of coffee, a lot of espresso. There we go. Some, some bourbon breaks in between, but. And it's different. I imagine these are different CRMs, different DMSs that you guys have, or are they all the same? No, we're all, we're all on one. So that was one of my biggest things coming into Casa here, um, year and a half ago was helping align the tech stack because it was a little bit all over the place, but now we are commonly aligned DMF, CRM scheduler, um, know everything so we have that similarity tech sec not only is it helpful for me it makes my job a lot easier but it's also at the health of the company so that if I have somebody who's at a store in el paso that wife takes a job offer in arizona if he wants to stay I can place him at one of the stores in arizona um in a role there and just transfer between the two stores for techion and crm within and it's a commonality in terms of that so it's not a whole new learning curve from a tech standpoint he knows what he's doing day in day out he's ready to hit the day day one running after going through that process manual at that store how they may tweak adjust things a little differently yeah and you know like well the here here's the the first time that you came across my radar jared is when you you hit the headlines selling the first vehicle with jermaine through metaverse what was that experience like painful but and maybe the la what did anybody else sell a vehicle through metaverse I haven't heard anything else no it was could be the first and only I remember it was like we were playing around with it. I mean, this was COVID times. Everything was changing. We were sitting there, had the goggles on and with Brian Kramer and having fun. And he's like, we need to look into this. We can sell a car in here. I mean, there's people that are in these goggles in VR day in, day out that are in Decentraland and all these different properties inside of the metaverse and were like build a dealership in here okay let's let's play with it and um you know we learned quick there's a lot of people that are overseas playing in there and they're coming to the instance and trying to ask questions and we didn't have anybody operating which helped further my discovery of ai even further and go real deep down the rabbit hole for ai But it fast-forwarded our journey that we were also going on simultaneously, which was to be a completely paper-ish transaction. So we wanted to go zero paper. And I still have it. I will always have it. You know, it's literally, and I know that even these are outdated now, but it's the USB, the old USB cards. And it's the old flash drive that you plug into your computer with all your paperwork. Like you were literally handed sign here on this iPad. Here's your paperwork. And I mean, I still don't forget it, but it's, that's the metaverse was fun. We had a couple of deals go through it. but we were able to figure out all the connection points between crm dms uh menu presentation for finance to dock sign into everything and we were able to stitch it all together to become paperless so if a consumer wanted to buy a car remote we could sell the car remote no questions asked we could handle it we could execute it with no problems Which to me was extremely cool. Totally. And it got cool publicity too for Jermaine, for you. Oh, Kramer was, he was loving it. We were living it and loving it. It was awesome. What's the next cool, what's the next metaverse? What's the next, actually it wasn't as disruptive as maybe people might've thought, but what's like, do you see something else as a cool big disruption coming up? Um, the one thing is the zero click, the zero click search and what relevance that's going to affect on overall website traffic lead generation and how set up are you for your website to be set up with your schema on your site to be relevant in zero click search. think that's going to be you know crazy so I've been playing a lot with that right now it's like okay how do I measure my index or store versus this store if I'm a consumer side of it how in the ai results am I being perceived versus they're being perceived in this community and it's very interesting because each zip code in each geo search location can provide a different result so it's now it's it's really going to be exposing the strength of your website's seo but also old things that I thought were going to be dinosaurs and become extinct and irrelevant are now relevant again dealer raider is one of them and I'm like I'm gonna pay for this why would I do it Because it's an open... Can you put more short form content in the dealerator and start to have your dealership get prioritized with the... We don't have to. The consumers do it. So it's looking at online reputation. Facebook and Meta are MFA prioritized. So it cannot be crawled by the AI agents for the results. But dealerators open. So it's being indexed. So now from a consumer sentiment using zero click and using AI search, that is kind of even more relevant now. And it's like, we haven't used this for years. Maybe we need to look back at this. Better Business Bureau is another one. You know, we're really dialed in with cost. But a lot of people are like, oh, I'm not reviewing it. I'm not going to reply to anything. You know, I'm just going to take care of it. It's open source. So it's not you can it can be indexed by the A.I. and yeah you might have some old stuff in there and this is where I've talked to some of the managers on it's like yes it may not be relative or relevant because this is three five years ago that salesperson doesn't work there but ai doesn't care this is what's going to display to the consumer in the ai search so how can we generate more content to these and is this now becoming more important then you're Google my business and Facebook reviews. I don't know because we don't have measurement data to it, but I will say it's something we all need to be paying attention to. Right. It's like if the future doesn't have these blue links in Google, a hundred percent using those as much, like that's a lot of budget for one for dealers to not be putting into paid search. How can we have our presence optimized to be pulled when there's these queries about where to get a good deal on Altima in my market? Well, it's funny you say that. I'm not a big user, but I've been studying more with Reddit. I thought Reddit was just the new Yelp. But there's like groups and forums that are talking about pricing. There's salespeople that put pricing and presentations and pencils up in Reddit for other potential customers' awareness. And that is all things that can be indexed. So it's like, what's the best lease deal on a Toyota Tacoma it's not gonna always pull the dealers or the manufacturers. It could be pull what Johnny got from his local Toyota store that was below map two weeks ago. And it's not a violation of ours, but it's our name on it. And it's a below map deal because it was a one-to-one customer interaction, but it's being picked up by AI and serving as a potential option for a consumer to explore. But it's what's the consumer trust factor of the Reddit, the Better Business Bureau, the Dealer Raider. Those are some of the unknowns, but we just don't know. So for me, the AI search and AI indexing is going to be extremely important here, I think, in the next three months, but five years. And the other one is voice search. Voice search is going to be big. I mean, you look at every car, Andrew, every car has Amazon pretty much built into it now. If you have Apple CarPlay or Google CarPlay, most likely you have Amazon Alexa built into it also. What do you feel like a dealer can do? What can a dealership do right now? Like some easy like a simple action that a dealer can take to get ahead? review your website, clean up your GTM containers, see who's all still has access to your website traffic and data and analytics and clean it up and build it to be effective, efficient on mobile first. We've talked about mobile first for fifteen years, but clean it up, remove the excess, make it a better experience on mobile, focus on mobile. And then from there, start tweaking, adjusting a little bit on your schema of your site with your agency or marketing team or department to make sure you are showing up relevancy in zero search and then test break stuff. I feel like that's like an issue that plagues every single dealership that I look at. Like you can just get like a GTM, whatever, a pixel helper that'll show you all the different tags that are on a dealerships website. And there's always dozens that are not being used. Which break things like the tracking and it makes it tough for like meta to be able to see true form fills and form completions and people that abandon the credit app for targeting and for attribution. But the big thing that I think a lot of dealers might be missing is that there's vendors that are still growing out retargeting audiences of people visiting your website that they could be now using for a different dealership. And it's slowing your website down and these other things. But for somebody to be sitting in your debt, like your shoes that understands it, that can look at it and be like, okay, step one, I'm going to do on my job. Like, this is what I would do if I started working as a marketing director at a dealer work, any doing anything at a dealership is like, let me clean up stuff on the website really quick. Like it's going to take me a minute to figure out whose tags and maybe I'll remove the wrong tag. And somebody's gonna be like, Oh, our, our system broke. We'll put it back in, but let's clean all this old junk out. So we're starting with a good foundation of our website and not getting hijacked. Our traffic's not getting hijacked by a competitor at least. Correct. And I think that's where we have to start. And especially if your website's been around more than three years, I think it starts with a cleanup, kind of a little spring cleaning here, summer cleaning, and then customizing and adjusting for mobile. yeah well jared I've kept you for about an hour which is about forty five minutes longer than I was thinking we were gonna talk but I I think you're an interesting dude and how do people connect with you what's a good way to follow you linkedin follow me on follow me on linkedin you guys can find me on linkedin um yep social find me on facebook instagram you'll probably get some pictures of all my kids, my dogs, but there's also some, uh, nugget drops I do in there too. Uh, but also just reach out to call or email. I mean, it's, uh, it's out there. If you can find it, get ahold of me. Yes. And, uh, okay. Let's say this, your house is on fire and you can only save one pair of shoes, a pair of shoes you're going to grab. Oh, that's a tough one considering I have about two hundred over here. It would be the Jordan One Air Dior Lowe's for sure. Jordan One Air Dior? Yeah. They did a collab with Dior? Don't look them up. They're expensive. You inspired me. I bought some over COVID. I bought a couple pairs just looking for meaning in life. I thought Jordans were going to fill it. These are good for when I set picks out there at the basketball court. They're the most comfortable things in the world. All right, brother. Hey, man. Well, thank you. It's been a treat to talk with you, man. It's always great. I look forward to having you in my Rolodex for somebody doing cool stuff and just keeping a finger on the pulse of what you're up to. And let's just keep collabing together to figure out how we can make this industry better and constantly change it. Let's do it. It makes it easier for our friends and our family who are in the market but not in auto. they can have an easier buying experience and we can have a little feather in our cap saying, hey, we caused some of this effect. Yeah, we're doing good. All right, brother. It was a pleasure. Appreciate it. Awesome. And scene.