#271 - Using AI In Your Dealership Today

You are listening to the Independent Dealer Podcast with hosts Luke Godwin and Jeff Watson.

Hello and welcome to the Independent Dealer Podcast, brought to you by Buckeye Dealership Consulting. Luke, there's a lot changing out there in the world right now. A lot of. A lot of stuff. And one thing I want to talk to you about and all of our viewers this week is this thing called AI.

It's all about AI Today.

Everything's got an AI tag on it. Right.

Hey, Jeff, are those glasses you wear in AI?

Yes. Yeah. This is an artificially generated image of me trying to look smarter. And I figured for a smarty pants episode, I'm gonna look as smart as possible, so.

Nice.

We're gonna talk about AI as it relates to Chat GPT and how that's going to affect dealerships. Right now, I'm not a pro, you're not a pro. We're not experts in the field. This whole thing's only a couple of months old anyway, so there's a. I.

Think when I brought this up, you laughed at me.

No, I don't think so.

Are you sure?

That would have been like three episodes that you first mentioned it, and we'd been kind of dabbling in it, and since then, I've kind of got into it pretty deep. Right. Like, I've. I've been using it, we've been implementing it here in the dealership for different stuff. So that's kind of what we want to talk about. And so dealers know. If you have no idea what this is, Luke, give us kind of the 10,000 foot overview. So the dealers know if this is maybe your first time or you've maybe heard of it, but you don't really know.

Okay. I think Jack Chat GPT was purchased by Microsoft for like $10 billion. Right.

And so, yeah. OpenAI.

OpenAI. And so in my understanding of it is that it is an auto artificial intelligent bot that generates. I think he can generate text as well as language. Correct, Jeff? Yeah. No, I don't know.

Yeah. And images. Yeah, yeah. That can take text to image. Yeah.

And it crawls Microsoft's horrible search engine called Bing and gets all of its information. And it's. It's a wonderful product, Jeff, but what you can do is say, hey, chat, write me a description for this car or write me a description for the Independent Dealer podcast, or write me a. Just write me a blog for my. For my website on this subject matter, or write me an essay about Abraham Lincoln. Right. It can do these things. It's, you know, that. Is that is about as much as I know, and that's about as dangerous as I can get.

Yeah. So it's a lot. It's what's called a large language model. Right. So OpenAI took basically all of the Internet's knowledge, all of the, of the transcripts, the natural writing, the language, everything, and stuck it into this generative model, transformers, what they call it. It's, it's, it only goes back to 2001. Right. So 2001 is where Chad GPT came out. There's chat, there's GPT4, which is a more advanced version. But if you guys go to Open AI, you can sign up, it's free. So I definitely, definitely recommend you go to Open AI, get in it, sign up and start messing around with it. And so let's talk about some of the use cases, because it's not, I see this as being very transformative for dealers. It's going to allow us to get a lot more done a lot faster. It's going to disrupt some of the things that we're currently doing and it's going to give us the ability to just be more efficient all the way around. Right. Because like Luke said, it can generate these things just with simple prompts.

Yeah, it's revolutionary for, I think, every industry, Jeff. I mean, it really can be. I, I saw something the other day where somebody was using it for like a Teladoc or a WebMD type situation and, and it took some college board exam for doctors and it made like a 98 on the, on the College Board exam. So it's, it's revolutionary. I say college board, but the medical board examination, it's revolutionary for every industry. So what we have to do as dealers, when any technology comes out, we've got to figure out how it works for us. And the most simple thing which we talked about several weeks ago was using it to write bar descriptions.

Right.

And, and there's always been something that kind of can do that if you have the right inventory management system. But what ChatGPT can do and does is it helps you with the SEO because it's pulling that stuff off the web and knows what to use. Right?

Yeah. And a lot of it is it's not like you're going to a service where it's giving you a template for a 2015 Ford Fusion. Right, Right. You can. And the key to Chat GPT, guys, I'm going to say this is the overall, the overall skill that we have to learn is the prompts. You have to learn how to give it the correct prompts to get the right thing out of it. Right. If you just say, you know, tell me about a 2013 Ford Focus, it's going to give you all sorts of nonsense that's really not going to be usable for you.

Right.

But if you say, give me a playful, entertaining sales Description for a 2013 Ford Focus with these features and reference Four Seasons Auto Sales with this phone, it will take all of that and expound it into a beautiful paragraph that you can copy and paste onto your website or into your ad. So it's learning the prompts, learning how to tell it the right thing. So a really, really good example, like Luke said, is using those car descriptions. Right. Another thing that we've been using it for, and we'll give you guys some examples of preference practical applications. I've been using it to write blog posts for my website. Right. Those are like the most dreaded things that could take you two hours to write a blog post on why you should buy a car from a. A car lot instead of buying private party, right? Yeah. It was super easy for me to enter those prompts in. Please give me an article in a friendly tone on why buying a car from a car lot has an advantage over private party. And it busted out an entire article. All I had to do was go in, kind of personalize, edit a few things, but it did all the heavy lifting for me, and then I just copy and pasted it onto my website.

I don't know if I. I've written essays and essays and essays for, you know, in college, and then I've written articles for magazines after, you know, in the last five years, maybe 10 years. And the hardest thing sometimes, Jeff, is getting started, right?

Yeah.

And, and what is neat about this, using this in your processes, which we've been talking about a lot on the newsletter, is that you can, you can do tone, which is great. And I'll tell you another way. We're using it here in a second, but it is, hey, chat, get me started on this. And then you can do your own editing to make it to. To make it feel like you're home. And it's just a very, very handy thing. And blog posts are so important for your website. The more you update your blog posts, and this makes it a lot easier to do the. Or Google crawls your website, and the better, the better you. You show up in searches, right?

Yeah. And who knows the way Google's going to get around everyone doing this and just flooding the SEO market with a bunch of, you know, AI Generated articles. But you're right, you can change the tone. And that's what's so interesting is when it writes that you can say, try again with a more friendly tone or try again and be funnier, you know, like. And then it'll rewrite the entire article with a different tone.

So in responding to emails from. From customers, we have started to use it because some of my. So my staff, what would have to happen is they would write the email, send it to me, I would edit it, and then send it back. Well, and we also use Grammarly, which I guess is some sort of small AI portion. But what we've been doing lately is you can tell, you know, I need a serious tone, I need a business tone in this return email, or I need a playful or joking tone in this email. And it's really helped our, our management staff and some of our salespeople to. To change the way they speak to customers. And I think it's helping. I might be wrong, but I think it's helping.

Yeah. Another way we've been doing it is I've used it to write my Google review responses.

Yeah.

So I will say, please, please write, please respond to this Google review in a friendly tone. And I'll copy and paste the Google review, and it will write a paragraph responding to that review as if it's me. Hey, thank you so and so for buying this car. Yes. Susan is an amazing employee. I hope you're happy with your 2013 Ford Focus, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I say, try it again, but use the tone of Donald Trump, and it writes it as if it's Donald Trump. This is just fabulous. Everything's great. So if you go to my reviews, you can see where I responded to these reviews. Have you.

Have you tried it with a. Have you tried it with a negative review?

No, I have not.

You need to try that.

That would be interesting.

Yeah.

The other thing I'm using it for is writing my policies. So I said, hey, Chad, I'm Four Seasons Auto, I'm a car lot. Please write me a employee policy on cell phone usage. And it wrote four pages. Well, two and a half pages of a cell phone policy. Right. And then I just went in there and edited it, changed a couple things I didn't like, and then copy and pasted it over to my policy manual.

That is.

I mean, save me. Save me four hours.

Jeff, I don't want to sound too crazy here, but, I mean, it's.

You're crazy.

It's revolutionary. I mean, beyond revolutionary. It is Any, anytime you can save. And actually we, Isaac and I were working on something on Monday that saved him two hours, three times a week because of something. Because of a report we made. Okay. And that's what this does. And that's why it's so important. How many employees can we save by using a product like this? Yeah, that is. That's what matters.

Let's get into that. First off, Luke, just quick plug, obviously, for Buckeye, sponsor of the podcast and great supporter of the show. I don't know. Here's where AI will help with your Buckeye products. Right? So when we talk about policies, the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to give a direction to please write me a sales script for selling my aftermarket products. Right. Like, please write a script for my salesman to present these products. Xyz. Right. And I'm going to go through and fine tune it and then I'm going to have actual scripts that I can hand my salesman and say, hey, here is the phrases you need to use during closing written by AI so that you can sell more aftermarket products.

Yeah. And another thing you could do with Chat GPT and Buckeye is that you could ask Chat GPT to write a blog on your website about the importance of Gap or the importance of buying an extended service contract, because I promise you that will be a blog that is read by a lot of people. So I mean, it's just amazing the uses that you can come up with where you didn't have time before, but now we have time.

Yeah, huge. And so along those policies and procedures manuals, you know, I had it write me a cash. You know what, what is my cash handling process? You know, how to reconcile my cash drawer. And it wrote out in like really good detail how to reconcile your cash drawer to your statements. Facebook ads. Right. Please write me three Facebook ads that are friendly about getting approved with little to no credit. Boom. It wrote out three Facebook ads about getting approved with little to no credit. And all I have to do is copy and paste those into my ads.

It's so neat. I'd say it is so neat.

Let me give you Luke. So we talk about the practical uses that we're using it now. Okay. Yeah. It's kind of funny. You ask it to write you something and it writes you something. Right. It's pulling language from the Internet and it's creating a paragraph, a policy, a procedure. Now let's talk about it. Creating and operating as an employee and actually fulfilling tasks. Right. And I think that's really the transformative part of this. It's like Luke said, if you can replace, not even replace an employee, but make an employee more efficient. Right? So two days ago, my social media girl came in here and I was like, hey, have you heard about this? And she's like, no, no, no. So right in front of her, I sat down and I said, well, here's what's going to either A, replace you or B, make you more efficient, depending on how you want to look at it. Because it can write all those things that she writes. It can write show notes for the podcast, it can write blog post, it can write ad copy. And she's kind of like, oh, wow. Oh my goodness. You know, it's like, okay, so do you want to learn to use this or do you want it to replace you? And that's kind of how we can look at it as owners and, and of a car lot is like, where can we put this into place? And where are the areas of opportunity to make our dealership more effective and our employees more effective or reduce some costs? Right?

Yeah. And I think you and I, when we were talking about this episode, the one thing that came to mind was you could use this technology as your BDC department. And I, I think that that is the number one application that we can use in our sales force and in our dealership. Because if, if we had a, I know we're not going to use chatbot, but we had a true, a true AI bot that could take every single incoming inbound lead and walk it to an appointment or an approval. You would, I don't know what you would do. You would, you could eliminate half of your salesforce. You wouldn't need a BDC department. And you, you could say, okay, make sure that you follow up setting that appointment. Make sure you follow up when they, when they get here. I mean, it's, it's everything in one. And I truly think this technology is heading that way. Don't you, Jeff?

Yeah. So currently there are AI chatbots when we say chatbot, Right. Like previously to now, a chatbot bot was pre programmed, right? It's like, yeah, press A or B. It was just a call tree. Right. Press 1 if want sales. Press 2 if you want collections. Do you want to look at a car? Well, here, you know, it was all pre programmed paths.

Yeah.

This is now a native language. It's a natural language model. Right. So it's like customers are not going to know that they're interacting with a bot. You're not going to know it, you're not going to know the difference. It's going to think you're interacting with a salesman. And this bot will know exactly your program, it will know your sales process. You will teach it how to interact with a customer and you can correct it. No, hey, when you said this, that's not accurate. Don't ever say that again. Or hey, when the customer gets to this point, our goal is to set an appointment. Please use my calendarly link and fill it out with an appointment. You know, so it's a natural system that can, it can also pull information from your website in real time, right? Yes. That 2013 Ford Focus is here. Me tell you about it, you know, so the ways this can be used as a BDC are just incredible because it will, it will do it perfectly every single time with no rest, no days off, no jumping the process, no going rogue and saying their own thing and their own scripts and, and how.

Many leads come in at 1am and 3am in the morning. It never sleeps. So you are constantly handling leads where right now you aren't.

Right.

And everybody knows how important it is to respond to a lead immediately.

Yeah. So I think of it in context of like our NEO sponsor. Right. If I could get this to be a NEO agent. And it's different than like again, it's not the chat bots, it's not the ninjas that like hear a word and then that automatically triggers a pre response. If this thing could naturally look at an applicant, pull credit, ask the customer about their credit score, do on the pay stub, check the Internet to see if this is a fake pay stub. I mean it can do all of those things just instantly. Right? Instantly. It can do verification of income, it can do verification of residents. You know, check their address against their credit report, check it against alternative data. Right.

Or check, check it against known addresses on the Internet associated with this person, which, which is out there. So it, it's, it's all these other side things that, that cost labor time and major labor time. You know, when it comes to, when it comes to us approving an application, yes, NEO puts it all into one space, which is super, super helpful. But it's the process of our salespeople having to, to make sure that it all lines up and fits in this box. But if a bot, not a bot, if AI could, could look at the Internet and squeeze it all down together really quickly, man, I mean that would save us, our salespeople could, could do everything.

Yeah. I mean literally you could, could have it all done, you could give the bot the ability and permissions to go all the way down to structuring a deal, right? Yeah. Based off payment to income, based on the preference of car that the customer wants. You could structure the entire deal and then just schedule the customer to show up or schedule the delivery. So because how hard all the documents.

How hard is it getting our SalesPeople to ask three times for the close or five times for the close? I mean, you tell, you tell AI one time to do it, it should work, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, you gotta ask three times. Yep.

And then they fall out of habits and they get bad. And I think the only issue you'd have is if AI started taking liberties that you would have to then reign back.

Well, I got him approved at 200amonth.

Yeah. Hey, AI, like I know you, you appreciate the sob story that that person told you about why they don't down payment, but they're liars. Yeah. You can't buy into the psychology or you can't, you know, maybe AI gets too, you know, compassionate for people and starts giving your cars away. So. Yeah, there could be the extreme end of things going awry.

Yeah.

Luke, Primal end sponsored the podcast. So these guys are the place to go to get money, to get funding. We know that funding is an issue right now. Another large, large regional Buy Here Pay Here subprime has bit the dust. Yeah.

I mean, and we kind of predicted it on our episode with with Tim Lawrence, but commonly can help you. And they, they're still lending, they have money. And actually, Jeff, we're going to sit down next week and talk with Paxton about Primalin and get a kind of whole deal of what they do. But they can help you own your property, they can help you with your floor plan, and they are there to help you with the struggles they've seen throughout the ages of Buy Here Pay Here. Right. They've got so much experience and they've got so many good people there. They're really a great company and they're a benefit. They're sponsor of Buy Here Pay Her United States and.

Yeah, yeah. Which is where we're going to be in just four days, right down in Vegas.

We're going to be there and like we've said before, we want people to talk to us. We're going to do a couple, a couple different interviews while we're there. We'd love to talk to, to you people listening, please come up to us. Tell us you love us, tell us you hate us. Make fun of Jeff with the Glasses, whatever.

All you think of right now, Luke, is now is the time to talk to those guys. Because guess what? All those America car credit and U.S.

Automatic sales, U.S. auto sales, all those.

Locations are now in receivership and or bankruptcy court. And the people who own the land underneath them, if they're not corporately owned, if they're privately owned and released, are going to be looking to put tenants in those spots. So if you don't own the current dealership you're in and you don't have a path to ownership, there's, this is an opportunity to look at one of those places that's already built out, that's already ready for you. And if you have your ducks in a row and can go in and make an offer to these people, now might be the time to snag up some real estate. Right?

For sure, for sure. And primalink can help you do that. And I can tell you this, the three locations that were just left, they're about two and a half miles from me, Jeff. And all through. Well, two of the three locations are really, really nice. One was a, one was a Porsche store and one was an Audi store. I've just got it in the back of my mind like, man, I'd really, really like to have those dealerships, but I'm not moving anyway, you know. Back to. To Chat GPT, Jeff, I have not tried this. Have you tried this? Let's say we have a car that's being a pain in the butt that we can't figure out what's wrong with it. Could we ask Chat GPT, hey, what are the normal issues with this code on this car? Have you tried that?

I have not. I've got that on my task list of things to do to use it as a Google, an Internet research tool for problem cars. But yes, that's, that's, that's one of the, one of the use cases, right. Like Luke was saying, you can do that with the medical field, right. They're creating. One of them is called Dr. Gupta and it's basically going to be an AI doctor. It's got all the data, it's got all the knowledge of every doctor on earth. Why not ask it questions as opposed to calling your guy who hasn't looked at a frickin science book since he graduated or a medical book since he graduated. Like why not use, you know, and the other thing we didn't talk about is the language. So this, it can speak natively in any language, right? So it automatically can translate everything into Spanish for you That's. You need that, right?

That's incredible. That's incredible.

Every language, it can automatically translate. So if you say, hey, please translate this ad into friendly Spanish or native Spain or southern dialect, you know what I'm saying? It will translate those things with pretty darn good accuracy for conversational Spanish. The other thing I was thinking about too is for those of you that are buy here, pay here, if I could integrate this into my payment platform, right, into my collector. Now I've got the same thing that we talked about on the BDC site, but on my collectors, right? It's automatically sending text messages, it's automatically sending emails, it's following up, it's creating solutions, it's problem solving, it's setting promise to pays, it's sending payment links, you know, so that the customer can automatically make the payments. I mean, how amazing would that be to have an employee that a doesn't get lazy, doesn't miss follow ups, but also has a memory retention that can say, hey, isn't this the fifth time that your grandma has died and you had to fund a funeral? Isn't this, didn't we give you a promise to pay six months ago? How incredible could that be? Instead of outsourcing our collections to, you know, Mexico or wherever, outsourcing to, we just, we just source it, right?

Yeah, I mean, I think bdc, you know, the BDC person and the collector are essentially the same person.

Right.

And if you could just say, okay, chat dpt. I want you to contact every customer that's over five days past due. I want you to contact them every day until you get a promise to pay. Go at it. You know, that would be, that's a game changer, honestly.

Yeah. And I think, you know, that simplifies it. I think it would be, it would have to be a very large prompt. Right? Like, yeah. To just say, hey, please text these people at five days. It's like, okay, you could get, things could go crazy. But you would, I think collectors or prompt writers or these companies, whoever this software developer is going to be that's going to make this API integration, you would of course build out a very, very large prompt that gives a lot of like guardrails to AI as of when to, when to contact, how to contact, what tone to use, you know, and then you'd, you, your collector would then spend the majority of their time reviewing the notes and retraining AI in certain situations how to not do this or not do that or maybe this should have been better, you know, so you're just training it. But the beauty is you tell it once, you don't have to tell it again.

Yeah.

And you don't have to retrain it when you replace it.

And it does it. You can train. You know, that's what's so hard with, with employees. And Jeff, I texted you about this yesterday. You can train your employees to do things and to do it, you know, task and to do it your way. And unless you are managing those people to a certain standard, guess what? Those employees quit doing everything you trained them and their task. And then you're like, what did you do all day yesterday?

It's.

This doesn't do that.

That's probably the best. One of the best selling points is. Yes. They don't fall into bad habits. They don't have bad days. They don't call in sick.

They don't look at Facebook or TikTok. Yeah.

They don't get lazy or distracted or. And I, hopefully they don't get sideways with a customer. Right. Like sometimes you have collectors and a customer and they just don't like each other. Right. They get sideways with a customer and they will just always be sideways with that customer. We gotta like your collector. Yeah, yeah, it's.

It.

Oh, so and so's not gonna come through. Okay. So you can, you can talk the bias or you can train the bias out of your AI in those situations. Absolutely huge. So if you've listened this far in the podcast and you are a vendor who is building something like this, please, please reach out to us.

Yes, 100%.

If you are a CRM that is integrating real AI into your platform, or if you are a payment platform, repay or pay near me or let's say or any of you guys that are doing this, please reach out to us. We want to talk more about this and invest as well. I think this is going to definitely be the future and can simplify our jobs as dealers. For sure.

Yeah.

And what about an AI bot that crawls auctions?

Well, I, you know, auction genius. And those things will say that's kind of what they do.

But, but does that like, like you use vinq, I use vincue. Right. And you have your, you have your like buying plan. But if this, but it can only, I mean, I don't know that it's proactively going out. Like you have to interact with it it and be like, okay, I gotta look. But if your AI is proactively going out to find you a four door sedan in the twenty thousand dollar range to fill a hole in your inventory. Like, and it finds it at the right price and ratio. It can execute the purchase based on condition report and all other kind of criteria. And then it can schedule transport. I mean, crazy.

It is revolutionary.

Well, what if you just say, hey, here's, here's my 2013 Ford Fusion and here's all the issues it has and it gives you a plan of action and it builds out work orders and it orders parts and it alerts you when the parts are delivered. You know, it sources the best part from all your vendors at the best price.

It quotes. It quotes and sends out the quote and you know, talks to the. It can say, okay, your radios, your radiator is bad. And the customer's like, what's a radiator? It will tell you what the radiator is.

Yeah, send pictures, AI generated pictures to the customer, get approvals process.

I mean, are you trying to get down to just you and your dealership?

Dealerships could be single point and everything is just AI driven and remotely delivered.

You know, I think I, I think, I think we've built it up as, as to be something great and I think it can be again, you've got to direct it and you can't. You know, as we've been talking about in the newsletter for the last couple weeks, you know, it's about processes, about building the right process. We're encouraging you to use AI in your processes. Hey, it could write your processes, but if you, if you use it properly, it can really help to streamline what you're doing at your dealership today.

Absolutely, Luke. That's the episode. We'll see you down in Vegas right here. Pay here United a couple days.

Sounds good.

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