¶ Intro
Pull the guitar out. Hey, go
this is Auto Collabs
Welcome to Auto Collabs
Oh, yeah, we were just you know, sometimes we're gonna do, I told Michael, while we were in the room, we're going to create a company that writes jingles. And that company is going to be called jangles. And our tagline is going to be hit him in the jangles.
will be like Joey and Jesse on full house. They went into the jungle
to be like, we don't have nearly the hair for that Cirillo. Right,
almost in tune with the harmonies, but not quite just just enough to make you mad about it.
Yeah. Why are you singing the national anthem mad about it forgot about that
was probably intentionally. No hate on for you. But the national anthem tuning is probably hard to hear in those stadiums.
I mean, you know, what could have helped there was some auto tune, which is kind of like AI for the voice. Sure is great
¶ Why ignoring AI trends is a significant oversight
segue, Michael.
What a segue. You know, the reason why we segue just like that, is because today we're talking to Brad title Gugu. Someone who was, has been always early in the adoption of new technology. And we're excited to get to talk to him about some of the new things that they're doing the way he's seeing the world. Always an insightful conversation. So we hope you enjoy this conversation.
Hey, Brad, thank you so much for joining us today on Auto Collabs.
Thanks for having us. I appreciate it coming. So it's great to be on your show. So it was
awesome to spend some time together at the NADA show this year. I just really appreciate your straightforward way of talking about tech of talking about the needs of dealers, I think a lot of times people can dance around. Because not even intentionally they can dance around because they have the like they think in a strictly technical way. So I don't know, I have a feeling that this conversation is going to be a lot more straight talk. Look forward to it. So let's
just start this way. I'm going to skip going on it not like people need another AI conversation. But I'm just gonna write I'm just gonna rip. I know I you are asking, Can we please talk about AI again?
But Brad's excited to I
can tell no, but because, Brad, because you're such a like, I'll tell it to you straight kind of guy. Can you give me in one second, we'll put you on the big spike, can you give me one sentence? Why we shouldn't be paying attention to AI right now?
And why we should not correct? Oh, I there's a huge mistake not paying attention to it. And I think AI will help optimize and revolutionize so much as the world from basic best practices that we don't consider today. You know, you look at title clerking in the paper process to perfect a lien and transfer titles in the cop problems and causes AI could solve that problem for both dealers, the brand and consumer. And so I think AI has a huge, huge
impact. You know, a lot of people say that AI will cost a lot of jobs, but AI over the next three years is supposed to create 25 million new jobs. So
what's the risk of over emphasizing over emphasizing AI? Because I kind of asked you the question is like a tongue in cheek, but what's the risk of over over emphasizing
¶ The risks of overemphasizing AI
you, you immediately kill the entire personal experience. And you remove that relationship building that businesses and consumers need to have if you want to build loyalty and retain their customers. So you know, AI is a tool, not a solution to everything, of course, as machine learning and deep learning continues to evolve with the risk of devaluing the human relationship involvement with the consumers. New ways to engage those consumers will always be a part of the process.
But you know, there is that risk, whereas you think all straight AI, you know, you're you're you're dehumanizing the entire experience.
You gave me a t shirt idea in there. Oh, no, it's just very simple. It's a simple statement. AI is a tool not a solution.
That that was my my takeaway, like I'm taking that
to the bank, because it'd be the title of this episode.
Everybody has been saying like, AI can solve that. Right? But I think AI is a tool in the Tool bill in which humans solve the problems utilizing the efficiency around AI and that is Like a narrative shift, I believe, absolutely.
You don't even need to, we can streamline the shirt and just it'll say don't be a tool.
I think I think they made that 93. That was like,
you know, it's interesting, though, you got me thinking about, Brad, which is this today. There, there are two sides of this narrative. There are those that are like I see it, I get it. I'm an early adopter, I can see how this is going to revolutionize your point of creating 25 million jobs. Then there's the other side of this, that the narrative, which is the people that, dare I say, are butthurt over the concept, because they're like, No, this is going to take our job.
But if we're being honest, most of the people that feel that way, weren't providing a better experience than AI for their customers to begin with. And I wonder if that's the reason they feel so threatened by it. Yeah.
¶ The effect of AI on jobs
The follow through guys, right? I mean, you have poor follow up, and you have poor engagement, when you're using AI on CRM databases, and you're automating the engagement, and then the follow up and reading the leads and be able to engage the consumers. That's where I think people become insecure when we think about in sales, for example, I personally believe that, you know, with the evolution of AI and the jobs that people fear, it will take away, it's going to create more jobs in different
ways. Because we're not embracing the human element.
Yeah, and where we're at in the timeline here is it's kind of a que right now to not know exactly what those jobs will be like, that's part of the fun of evolution is figuring it out as we go.
Yeah, I mean, he has gonna absolutely revolutionize and move us forward faster than we've moved in the last 80 years. There's no question about it. And you can't really see the what the future looks like Go is picture like the Jetsons. But in reality, AI can solve a lot of problems and make people more effective, more efficient, and be able to improve their job.
But you know, when we started with AI that many years ago, when we started learning about these bots in the chat space, and testing them with stupid questions, and they would answer you with awful responses, we quickly learned that we prefer to use AI as an assistant solution. So we actually call it
AI assist. And what it would do is it would focus on, you know, the conversational intent of the question, it would focus on the contextual awareness of the question, so that it could understand the question and be able to know it could answer it, whether it's appointment pricing, the vehicle availability, the trade, pay off with actual trade value included, it could answer questions repeatedly and save time for the operator resourcing this, especially when you have
four channels with one operator, three minutes to answer one question leaves three other people waiting nine minutes on one question. So three, four questions. Do we have a long time? So we use the AI to assist to assist us to find the answers, keep the operator involved, review the response, and then submit it to the consumer. So that there is that human element? So right, I mean, you guys great on so many levels, but it won't convert at the same level, if it answers every question, because the
consumer doesn't need to. So there's that. Do you think you'll ever get there? Yeah, absolutely. 100% the machine learning that's going on the deep learning that's been invested in all the new things that people are investing in AI to solve problems for, like I was talking about Title Clerkin.
You know, there's groups that have 60, people handling title perfection and transferring when you don't have when you don't have to deal with a wet signature, and you can connect all the DMVs all those jobs will change. And the complaints in the impact of not having the title transferred properly, will improve consumer experience the dealerships. And I think that just like that, AI is already playing a role in how omni channel providers can assist the customer more effectively,
efficiently. I think it will also affect the entire online retailing, you know, like your first question, you know, the problems with going from online to in store. Yeah, being able to continue where you left off when you're in the dealership, if you calculate a payment online, but I never considered the payoff, you're gonna find out when you're going to the store and it's gonna upset the customer that they're gonna find out what the payout errors and the payment you saw wasn't accurate.
And then there's also the whole connectivity, being able to connect the online to back office systems, not just the DMS, but the CRM, the finance tools, all the way to sending and submitting contracts to in transit. So, you know, these processes can be improved now with Absolutely. Well,
yeah, one of the things that I think that as, as the auto industry world that we've done is betray the trust of the consumer. Right. And I Every single element that you've just pointed to whether it be titled clerking or payments or the process in store contracts, in transit or anything like that, there are so many opportunities, whether intended or not intended to actually betray the trust of the consumer, because human error or intervention actually gets in the way of what could be an
automated process, right. And so, it unintentionally or intentionally, we have not created software ecosystems that, that ensure trust is transferred all the way around the vehicle, the purchase process, and that's where, like, the human can now be enabled to, like, build trust in the relationship and not have to also build trust in a potentially lackluster process.
Right. Which is, that's a hard thing for like, for, for a human to build trust in a process is a lot different than a human to build a trust in another human. Right. Oh, that's the trick,
¶ How AI can inadvertently betray consumer trust
right? When when systems betray the employees trust you that someone coming in, they saw a payment online, they get the trade information, the AI or the the technology quarter to payment, and then they have to explain to the person when they come in that they don't have the payoff. And that's when those people need to trust, right. So the systems have to be able to work together so that the end users trust the system, once the systems are
trusted by the end users. Then when you're using AI to deliver accurate information, it's actually actually effective and accurate. Then the individuals actually bring the authenticity to the experience is what I believe.
Yeah, because how many I mean, you guys probably deal with this a lot. But like, you know, when I was at the dealership, we used to look at like, monthly active users and all of our systems, like how many people were actually logging into the
systems. And typically, it wasn't because the system was was was bad by nature, or even, like, there's a lot of arguments like, oh, there's too many systems Well, shoot, people log into, like 33 social media accounts a day and check five emails, they know how to log into multiple systems, that's not the issue. It's that that system has betrayed the trust of the actual employee at some level, right? Very employee doesn't want the customer so they're mad. Yeah. And
I believe that that's where the AI as it's getting smarter, more effective and more efficient. And as just the consumer of the world, everybody on the planet that, you know, had to start talking, texting or emailing and stop mailing, started adopting the trust of AI on site with the questions. When those as this improves, I believe that the human element is what brings authenticity to the whole
process. So I think there's an equal balance between the two, I think the AI efficiency and effectiveness.
Here's a question that I have for you just from like a product building perspective, because this is this is one that's interesting that I haven't really poked at with anyone that is building a lot of AI technology right now. But you you've you just said eight years ago, you were starting to experiment, a goober goo with AI at whatever level it was then Right? A lot more machine learning less AI, right? Until, you know, the these large language models came into play.
But when you think about, like, what's the difficulty right now of, you know, pivoting so quickly, for a SASS company that has to rely on something that's like, not yet fully baked, and build it into the entire ecosystem of a product, right? Because you've got product roadmaps, you've got things that dealers are asking for things that you've had on the roadmap that are three, four or five year product roadmaps. And now you get this injection of a net new thing that is altogether
better. But actually like that takes a lot of work to kind of pivot and figure out how it works into the roadmap and how you shift and move and gain the dealer's trust on the product roadmap, what does that look like over the past couple of years?
That's the story of my career. We're all in a feature war race, right? We're all chasing the features are all chasing the best experience. We're all trying to connect with all the API's. You know, at the end of the day, you know, we're building a new all in one CRM
platform. So the focus platform that will encompass and include our entire retailing tools from Google view our omni channel tools so that we reinvent the new CRM 2.0 I call it's not just contact management, but it's omni channel Real Time engagement so I don't have the email somebody or I don't have to send a text to them because I can see they're on WhatsApp typing and I can deliver them as agenda can use the retailing tools to communicate through
that channel. So we're streamlining all of this right now. We're working on a big CD project called the curator. And of course, you know, with the inputs of AI, there's so many areas of the business that companies never, people didn't try to change or optimize, like, you know, improving titling, because it's such a laborious role, right? With AI, you can do these things now. So we're looking at our investments and
our strategy with AI. And as we're bringing everything into the all in one CRM platform, and introducing our own CDP with all first party data, we're looking at how the AI is going to automate marketing best practices for dealers and their agencies, we're looking at how the AI can read the information in the CRM from inbound leads or tax to the attachments to opportunities based on age day, last response time to be able to
continuously re engage. So to me AI is as a strong instrument and very flexible tool that can optimize many different individual inefficiencies that people have in their work to help them become better and more effective and scale better. Let's be by the
way, thank you for not using the term CDP and AI in the same sentence, because you might have just broken the space time continuum.
Or at least gave it a period in the middle of it. Period in the middle.
¶ Gubagoo's development of new CRM platforms integrating AI
When we had our last interview, and it was just introducing a prototype for our vision plan for CDP. And you know, it's funny, you know, eight years ago, conversational commerce was used everywhere, then. Now CDP has been used so many different ways. I don't even know the true definition, you know what it means anything other than my own, other than mine?
What do you want? What's
interesting to me is, I can't help but think that technology is only progressing at lightning speed for those that weren't paying attention to a degree. like, Wait, where did all this come from? It's like, Have you not used Google over the last 30 years? Like, Have you not understood that machine learning was the precursor to where we're at now. And we have language learning, but before that, it was programmatic, like, some form of a seed of AI has existed
since like, the 50s. Right? And the reason it feels like it's happening so fast now is because you just pop your head up, there's a new hype around things like GPT, or Gemini, or whatever. And it's really making people hyper aware, and then they and then they get all freaked out. But I feel like for guys like you, Brad, you being in it for quite some time, even bringing up George Jetson which, by the way, that's a side topic because he was born two years
ago. Yeah. So if we're really tracking timelines, by the time he's 40, when the show takes place, we will have flying cars, because people then 40 years from now we'll be like, Where'd all these flying cars come from? You're like, dude, do you not remember 2024 When the FAA approved the first prototype, you know, so, from your perspective in building out these these, you know, software's and these AI tools? How do you envision
getting broad adoption? Right, because there are a lot of there are early adopters, but there are going to be a lot of people that are like, Whoa, this is moving too fast for me, what's the inroad to help everyone understand that this isn't going away? Well,
so if I think about when I entered the chat space in 2010, there was three big companies and for us, our strategy was a future war to get ahead in order to grow. Then when we started to hear about online retailing, if it wasn't for COVID, I don't think retailing online would have been where we are today, the fast tracking of it was pretty impressive. Speaking for understanding my business, the growth that had during the times when, you know, chat was not an essential product. Retailing
wasn't essential. dealers could spend 10 different ways and still had to number and afford the big budget. And, and then it changed became essential, right. But in the last two years, I have never seen anything, like the impact that AI has taken hold on a sudden, were like you said, everyone's head has popped up because hey, everyone can learn quickly and through viral the chat GPT site people can play with and started to recognize personally how the value of this could can impact
them personally. Whether it's generating code or generating PowerPoints are any question you can actually get the answer. So it started to build the trust and and went viral. And with that, the world has embraced it, and it's just grown faster than I've seen any segment. Technology the last 20 years. And it's super fast right now. And there's so many areas of AI that if the world opened up API's to everyone, you could connect the data and do so much more. But it is a fragmented
space in automotive. So how do you use the tools how to build it to make it work, I don't think that the tech was ever designed to disappoint or let people down. Retailing, for example, was a fast tractor and during COVID, where not everybody was in place to open up API's from lending down to credit information to trade data. So the tools are built as the best we could, I believe across all the competitive landscape. And it's been a feature war since the adoption
of COVID. With retailing to get the pay off, connect to the DMS connect to the CRM, right, and so letting those people down was just a matter of the way the speed of the market, right and the adoption and AI is a perfect example of something to me that 24 months used to be called bots, and was pretty worthless, in my opinion, eight years, right now. It's kind of such a long way. So Fast Six, bots were worthless, Thomas perceptional II, right? Today AI is still abide by definition, but super
powerful. Camera quantum computing, it's even going to grow even faster. So I think the world has recognized how AI can impact every single person on the planet individually. And that's why there's such an interest.
I was personally a little bit frightened because I can only picture me never leaving a recliner, because AI
will be about that. For me, called Wally Mike.
Oh, man. Well, listen, Brad, we're so glad that you were able to share some time with us today on Auto Collabs. Thanks for sharing all of your wisdom with us. We really appreciate it.
I would appreciate it as well. Thank you for having us. You know, we know there's a lot of stuff coming out with AI and being released in platforms with with our CDP connecting all the customer data, first party platform data in our platform that will be able to connect all of our retail and our omni channel tools to CRM. We will see some big stuff coming out over the next year.
I feel like there should be a musical outro Come on. We're gonna do it. goober who? goober goober. goober who
helped out with that one? Man, the the like, simple statement. He was like, you know, eight years ago, we were messing with this thing called AI. Right. Da? Of course you were. Right.
It's I think what came up in that interview is rarely rarely talked about. It's like the the seeds of this, Michael, you said it have been like, if you're paying attention. You've seen it coming. seen it coming. You've seen it coming. But I mean, obviously now the momentum is picking up. That's still happening.
What was the shirt title that that? That he gave us about AI? Now I lost it. Oh, my goodness. What am I doing there? Oh, it's not it's it's it's a tool, not a solution. It's not
a solution. Oh, gosh, I'm gonna be wearing that don't be a tool.
Don't
be a tool shirt. Right from 1993. Right. And I think that that's really key for us to think about as an industry just an end with any net new tool, instead of just believing that they're the silver bullet solution, like, oh, AI can solve everything. Oh, if I had a CDP? I'd be good. Yeah. Oh, if time on whatever x is,
oh my gosh, remember, just like a couple years ago. It's like I have digital retailing on my website. Solved. Right?
Yeah, no, it's a tool that humans implement in order to create the solution to have betterness guy and build systems around
why this is why I asked the question about people paying attention because like, Google's existed for how many years now? Let's just say 3025 I don't know, whatever it is. 20. So fast forward to today, when we've even made it a verb. You know, Google, you know, just Google it right? How many people on mass still don't know how to use Google effectively enough. And are just like, that's what that's what I think about with AI. I'm like, Well, I look at my my in laws, like my mother in
law. Bless her heart still believes that if she does not specifically click the Sign Out button on her Yahoo mail account, that her emails will seep out into the ether. You
know, bless her heart means when you live in the south, yeah.
She doesn't live Send of this, they don't listen
to the pod good. Okay, we're fine, we're fine. Like,
will there come a time where certain people may be our age demo? Paul, will age out of all of this and just be like, who cares? I don't even care what's going on in the world. I just want to read the newspaper. No,
I still I don't I don't. I don't want to read the newspaper that I want to age out of having to read the newspaper at all. Right there. I want to start every day just like we started this podcast with a guitar and some writing some songs for our company. jangles
company Yeah, goes you know, what never ceases to amaze me, though, is just how much innovation is happening in the automotive industry. I know sometimes when you get a bad rap, and we're like, oh, no, we're behind the times and this and that, when you really pull out, you look at a company like go boo goo or many of the others. Like we're at the forefront of a lot of innovation. And I think a lot of industries are actually looking
inward to ours. So with all that line, hey, hope you guys enjoyed this episode with Brad. If you're listening to this before ASOTU CON, it's not too late dope, just saying it's not too late. You a ticket at the door? Yeah. Hey, hotel rooms selling out fast. Over what do we have now? 100 speakers, close 99. Thinkers, panelists, subject matter experts. Ever heard of the book, unreasonable hospitality will be there like over that that is worth the price of admission alone. Go to
ASOTU con.com. Grab your tickets, we'd love to see you there. If you're listening in the future. Oh, ma Oh, hope we see you at the next one. Whenever it is. In the future, you might be listening in 2016 May 2025. Just roll in on a scooter just circle
the middle part of May, whatever year you're in, it'd be like that's when ASOTU CON is going to happen when we block it off.
But you can tell we're super excited, super passionate about it. We're digging into a lot of topics that are going to help you dominate through the next 1824 to 48 months, especially through all the volatility of the market. Don't do it alone. There's no reason you should be doing it alone. Get in the room where we are coming up with active solutions. Hope to see you there. So to con and on behalf of myself, Michael Cirillo, Paul J. Daly Kyle Mountsier. Thanks for watching Auto Collabs.
Sign up for our free and fun to read daily email for a free shot of relevant news in automotive, retail media and pop culture. You can get it now@asotu.com That's ASOTU.com If you love this podcast, please leave us a review and share it with a friend. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time. Welcome to Annika Are we recording