Upcoming Webinar Series: Unleashing the Power of AI for Your Dealership!

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another Volley rally. Today I'm joined by someone you don't get to see terribly often, but that is Peter Sperry, our CTO here at Volley. Peter, how's it going?

It's going super well, Jake, how are you doing?

Good, though I get to enjoy. We're filming this in late December. I get to enjoy December in South Florida and you get to enjoy December in Minnesota. So I think I'm doing better than you are.

You might be. We just. This, you know, this might not age well. We just got our first winter snowstorm of the year yesterday and today, so there's some beautiful fresh snow on the ground and I'm sitting right here next to the Christmas tree. So good day.

Well, good. Well, today Peter wants to share with you all some information on an upcoming webinar series that he is going to be hosting relating to AI and some of the neat ways that you can utilize it with your store. With that said, Peter first wanted to dive into our philosophy and some of the background on our AI strategy. So, Peter, what's on your mind with AI?

Yeah, we've had an interesting few years in the automotive industry and in the technology industry on the whole, really ever since the release of Chat GPT, which was kind of the first public release of any of the AI type technologies where normal people like the rest of us could understand what it's all about, understand what's behind it, et cetera. And in the market, it was flooded with a whole bunch of what I'll say, early entrants or prime movers in the AI space. And some of them made some incredible claims, some of them made more conservative claims. And one of our values that we, that we try to live by at Valley is that we want to do things as perfectly as possible. We would rather do less and do it perfectly than do more and, you know, fail or fall short. And so we were really hesitant, I was really hesitant to start meaningfully developing AI functionality and AI technology within the Volley platform before the technology was really ready. You know, if you think back 20 or 30 years ago, for those of you that were around what your cell phone looked like 20 years ago, it was kind of, they were not the same. And so we wanted to sit back and let the technology settle out and maybe take what I'd consider a second mover's advantage. And so we've, over the course of the last six to nine months, really firmed up our AI strategy and how we're going to implement it within the application. And we're pretty excited about our approach. Our approach is human enablement, not labor replacement. We want to make the users of Valley and the users of AI way more powerful than they are today. Rather than say that you're going to be able to downsize your staff or downsize your management team, or downsize your development team, whatever you're doing, we want to make people better, we want to make people bionic, not replace people. So as a part of that, as Jake said, just to outline our AI strategy, we've actually hired an AI team. So I brought developers on that have early experience in education and AI and some of the LLM, GPTs, custom model building and data science. And what we're trying to do is build out a team of experts so that we can bring all of those functionalities and all of that technology to bear within volley in small and big ways. So we've got some upcoming product releases that we won't talk about on this session, but that use AI in really, really small ways. LLMs in really small ways. And then we've got some more advanced functionality that we'll be rolling out over the course of the next six to 12 months that really focuses on many making your agents better, making them more productive, making your management job, management team's job easier, making results easier to achieve and to be able to demonstrate within your dealerships.

So with all of that said, and it is a great snapshot into a lot of the conversations we have on a weekly and monthly basis here. But what's going on with this webinar series?

Well, as some of you know, we have a couple of 20 groups that we run at Volley, which are sort of our power users, and we run two different groups and every quarter we have a session where we sit down with each of those groups and we talk about things. And not surprisingly, one of the topics that's come up on literally every meeting since we started is what are these BDC managers? What are the BDCs and what are the dealerships doing within AI? And as a result of a lot of education, you know, I've gone back to school on this, taken a bunch of extension courses from a couple of my old colleges where I've done extension courses from in the past. We've started to send people through online training as well as extension courses on the AI team. And I don't want to say that we're experts, but we've got an incredible amount of exposure and we're using it every day, day to day on the development team, both with the team at large and with our AI team specifically. So we're using LLMs every single day to make us more productive, to streamline operations, to write better code, to bounce ideas, really to iterate through the software creation process as well as some of our processes, documentation, et cetera, within the dev team.

And so not to make you lose your train of thought, but for people who don't know what is an LLM.

It stands for large Language model. It's, it is a, it's, it's really a set of algorithms and data that at the core, and I, I won't go into tremendous detail because it very quickly I'll be out over my skis, but the large language model effectively attempts to predict the next word that you are chatting with it about and then what it is responding to you about based on its training data set. So if the training data set was a document that you had on how to sell a car and that was the only thing that the LLM knew, you could interact with it in a way where it would try to understand the question you're asking and then based on the training data, try to issue the appropriate response.

Got it. Okay, so then back to the webinar.

Yeah, so we've learned a lot and we're using it every single day, probably more than your average set of users. And because of all the questions that have come up around AI and around the LLMs, you know, chat, GPT, llama, Claude, are the, are the bigger ones that people have had questions about. There were just too many consistent questions within our 20 groups where I thought, you know, I will take what we've learned and we would like to not connect to DI Volley, but just for the benefit of BDC managers across the country and the automotive industry, we would like to outline a series of what I'll call practical ways that you can use LLMs in your day to day tasks, day to day job duties, et cetera, just for being an agent, for being a team lead, for being a BDC manager, for being maybe even we'll have some sales managers, service managers, et cetera, join in the webinars just to figure out how they might leverage the power of these tools in practical ways from a day to day basis.

So this is for all levels of the people that we work with, your managers to your agents, to service direct, you know, all the people who interact with Volley.

Yep.

Yes.

I had a dealer once tell me that, you know, if he could just have a tool that told him which tools he needed to use and which reports he needed to actually pay attention to that. It would make his life easier. And a lot of what we're trying to do within this LLM webinar is really help dealers and help employees at dealerships and BDCs just be better at their jobs by leveraging these modern tool sets.

Awesome. I think this will be a great series where we can help teach how you can utilize these tools like Chat GPT to make your day a little better as an agent, as a manager. When can everyone look forward to this starting?

We're going to kick these off after nada this year. So this year nada again, this might not age well is in New Orleans at the end of January. So right after nada we'll be kicking off a four session series and we'll do one a month for four months and each month we'll have a different topic. At the beginning of the series I will send out a course outline and your CS managers. If you're a volley customer, your CS managers will have the outline for you so that you might want to maybe attend all of them, maybe only attend one or two of them. If the topics look interesting. Each session will be about an hour in length. We'll try to keep them to an hour and the outline will go through a target objective for maybe a practical use or some some ideas for how you might use it in a specific area. And then there will also be some hands on time where people within the webinar can bring me questions or bring me thoughts and we might try to solve a problem together live and on the webinar. That way the other people can participate, they can see how we approach problem X and maybe they can use it to solve problem Y.

Awesome. Well, we are looking forward to sharing this all with you and feel free to reach out to your Volley rep if you want more information on this and want to make sure that you get this on your calendar. And we'll also make sure to reach out again. We'll put this in our newsletter ahead of time next month and make sure that you're all ready to go. So Peter, thank you so much for taking the time today. Merry Christmas to everyone and I hope you have a fantastic day.

Yeah, thanks everybody. Have a great day.