The AI Reality Check Every Automotive Vendor Needs with Laurie Halter

Paul J Daly: 0:00 Okay, I have a riddle for you. What is optimistic, technologically focused, people centered and on the show today. Unknown: 0:12 This is auto Collabs. Paul J Daly: 0:18 That's not allowed, no chat. GPT is only that way if you tell it starts with the Unknown: 0:23 letter L and rhymes with Ori halter. Paul J Daly: 0:28 I'm so excited. Laurie alter is today's guest, and she is just so much fun to be around. She's one of those people that if you're in the proximity the blast radius of her overall energy, you just start to feel like you should be smiling and being a little more positive, which makes sense, because she's so Unknown: 0:47 right. Yeah, dare we say, she brings the charisma. Paul J Daly: 0:53 You know, I wasn't even thinking about Unknown: 0:55 that, Laurie, you're welcome. Paul J Daly: 0:57 I know communications. Laurie is one of the most seasoned PR people in the auto industry. We're very excited to just call her a friend and to have her on the show today to talk about a topic that everybody's talking about. Ai, so we hope you enjoy this conversation. Lori halter, Laurie, it has been way too long since we've had the opportunity to sit down and have a podcast type conversation. Thanks for joining us today on auto Collabs. Laurie Halter: 1:25 I'm so excited to be here, guys, it has been I was just telling you off screen. It's been a minute, so I'm excited to be on with you both. Oh, likewise. Paul J Daly: 1:33 So entrepreneurs, no grass ever grows under our feet, right? We are always trying to do something new, and you're one of those people that it's like, Catch Me If You Can. If anyone's ever run into you at a conference or an event, or has been engaged with you in any way they know, Kyle Mountsier: 1:48 literally, Paul, look no, this is not a joke. I think I actually played Catch Me If You Can, at the last conference where, like, I was like, Unknown: 2:03 we were like, both you were running this way and I was running Kyle Mountsier: 2:06 this it was amazing. You could have and, like, gotten one of those good, like, side swipe videos where it's like, that person's always running the other way. It would have been magical. Paul J Daly: 2:15 Yeah, so you in the vein of that is that you've been in this industry for a long time. You've been helping a lot of people. You kind of have your fingerprints all over a lot of industry partners and dealerships and and the communications and the public relations and the a lot of what people see and hear about companies. A lot of times you're in the back channels, kind of crafting messages and trying to understand the needs, and understand the needs, not just at the industry partners, but of you know, what we all focus on is like, how can we serve the dealers best? And you kind of had this new idea over the last months. And like every great entrepreneur, you don't just have ideas. You actually say, I'm going to do that thing. So you've done a thing, and now you have independent research about to be published into the industry, or it is published into the industry. And you focused on service. Tell us a little bit about why you decided to, like, synthesize research and give it to the industry. Laurie Halter: 3:08 Well, I love that. And in truthfully, like you guys said, I'm an entrepreneur at heart, so part of it right is like, Okay, now I'm bored. What can I do next? But Paul J Daly: 3:16 what does it mean now I'm bored? Unknown: 3:19 Me on a Monday. Just every Laurie Halter: 3:21 single entrepreneur ever. But really, where it came from is as owning a PR firm and working with dealers, vendors, investors across the industry, we realized that there's a hole. There was a hole in the content. So there's a lot of fantastic content creators. You guys are a great example of that. But like deep dive research that really gets into the heart of some of these topics, was missing, and so we decided to step in and kind of be in that space. So we our first report was on the CDK breach last summer, and it was all about cyber security in the dealerships. We released that, and then afterward, we really started seeing a need for AI based research, because that's all any of us are talking about, right? Is ai, ai, and we decided to dive into that within fixed ops. So this is our second research that we put out, and it really came from, like I said, a need that I saw. You know, publishers are doing a great job with the articles. You all are doing great job with digital content. But we really didn't see like deep diving research on some of these topics, and so that's where the idea came from. Kyle Mountsier: 4:33 Yeah, it's interesting to me, because a lot of times the research that you see within our industry is either done by someone that has a product they can sell or someone from outside of the industry that doesn't really understand it, right, like a McKinsey comes in, does a deep research, and you can, you can read it, and go, Yeah, I think you got like Unknown: 4:51 88% Paul J Daly: 4:52 of it, right, but you don't have the context, Kyle Mountsier: 4:55 the context of that 12% right? Yes, Laurie Halter: 4:57 yes. And we're seeing on the back end as a PR. I'm like, I understand the analysts, I understand the research, I understand the companies that are paying to be a part of those reports. But what happens is, like you guys talked about, then you're not getting as independent information as you need. And so with this report, we really focused on, like, there was no paid opportunities, nothing sponsored it truly was just going out into the industry, talking to dealers, talking to vendors, talking to investors, and trying to bring about a very neutrally played report of information about AI in the service. Kyle Mountsier: 5:29 What was something that you learned along the way? Because, you know, you venture into something like this, and it's not like you haven't written before, understood the industry before, done like your own personal research, but what was something that you've learned contextually, that maybe you weren't expecting, not maybe specifically about AI, but like, as you're starting to do these research, things that you're like, I just never thought about doing that piece or what contextually? Laurie Halter: 5:53 Yeah, I think what we've learned overall, that's been fascinating, and it should be like, a no brainer is, everybody wants information about what the dealer actually thinks, right? So the dealer, it's it like all these vendors and tech partners are creating products for the dealers, but no one's going to the dealers to say, like, what do you actually want in these products? So one of the most interesting things, I think, to come out of this is there's truly a hole in the industry when it comes to like, dealers speaking to vendors about this is what we want you to create, and vendors actually creating things that are fit the need of the dealers. So I think, like for me, I was like, Oh my gosh, there's a complete disconnect between what the dealers are actually needing and what's being produced for this industry. Paul J Daly: 6:37 Okay, so tell us a little bit about the report. What's the premise of the report, the type of research that was done to generate the findings. Laurie Halter: 6:45 Okay, also, let me start with so the report is and the service drive, we had a completely independent research team do it. So I've had people say, like, you're a PR firm. How could this possibly be, you know, like, neutral. And the truth is, I kept myself completely out of it, like I wasn't a part of any of the interviews. But our research team went out. They spoke with dealers, vendors in the space, investors in the space, did their own research, spoke with some of the media companies that have reported on AI, and really put together this very comprehensive guide on what AI is. Where are we, truthfully in the market with it, and we're further behind than we thought, than we like to think. And what do the dealers really think about the technology? Like, do they think AI is helping? Is it helping? And so from that, we came up with, like, an 80 page report with a also a vendor guide that takes 12 to 15 of the vendors that we found the research time found through AI and rank them like based on, here's what they do, here's their cost, here's the benefit to the dealer. We really were focusing on being that resource in the space that's neutral and says, Look, we're going to get everybody together and tell you where we're at. How much does it cost, and is it really going to fit the needs of what you're doing in your dealership? Kyle Mountsier: 8:03 We're behind. So what do you mean, like, what specifically are we behind? In my thoughts, yeah, Laurie Halter: 8:09 yeah. So I think the vendors think that adoption is at a certain level, and that the dealers can't wait to help, like, streamline their process and help with customer service. The dealerships we talked to are like, we are hesitant. I don't I don't know what I think about this. I don't know if I like it. So I think when I see behind like the vendors, I think, and this goes back a little bit to the disconnect I was talking about in terms of like, that intermediary between the dealers and the vendors. I think the vendors thoughts are that everybody is understanding what AI is, how it works, what it does. Meanwhile, the dealers are like, whoa, whoa, whoa, could this even help us? Let's, let's take a step back, like, Could this even help us? And where can I Paul J Daly: 8:50 think, I think one of the helpful parts of the report, and this is early on in there, is you talk about clear categories emerging in the AI space, AI space, which I think is super helpful. And so segmenting the guide out into these segments, because I think, like you said, everyone's AI this, AI that. So AI is this big umbrella term that people can get, like, literally swallowed up by so you broke it down into four categories. It's communication, AI, marketing, AI, service operations, AI and infrastructure and consulting. So do you Did you see, or do you know from the research or other hand, what people tend to adopt? First Laurie Halter: 9:32 Great question, and it's definitely by far like the biggest adoption and the biggest thought of AI right now on the dealer side, is outbound tax. Like in their like in their mind, outbound tax, you know, to bring in service appointments, is number one, and it should probably be step one. But I think what's missing is, like the deeper understanding that that is just the very tip of the iceberg, right? Like you go from then you go into the marketing, which is outbound in inbound tax, you go into service. Scheduling would probably be number two. And then you get into three and four is really like, okay, technician, how do we help solve the technician shortage with AI tools? And the fourth, then finally, is like, predictive maintenance and analytics, like so that's, we're nowhere near predictive maintenance and analytics, but that is kind of the, the final kind of category that we see coming into automotive Kyle Mountsier: 10:24 it is interesting to me, because, you know, and this is my argument is, I think that the largest llms in the world are probably asking themselves in board meetings. They're probably going, how do we get into retail, auto? Yeah, the money's so big, right? They know that. They know that it's there, yep, but there, there's no translator to do that like I think about the financial sector right now. We just read last week that the financial sector is, is getting an overhaul, because Claude and perplexity is capacity, or Claude capacity, specifically, when it comes to what anthropic has built for financial modeling and buying and buying and selling, you know, on exchanges is like, far surpasses any analysts expectations, yeah, and yet, perplexity hasn't come and like Gone, direct to service, drive, selling, right? And we always, we always struggled it with this as an industry, ever since the technological revolution in the like, you know, 2005 to 2013 range where, where we kind of have a bunch of purpose built solutions. But you know, a sales force, a HubSpot, a perplexity, you know, any of those find it a struggle to come into, into auto Where did you see a gap in your research, anywhere, of like purpose built solutions, kind of having to pave the way for, you know, the adoption that an industry is ready to take Laurie Halter: 11:57 such a good question. Call it, and it's we totally found that. I mean. So I'll give one example from the report ally peters out of calendar. We all know and love Allie. She was one of the people, the fix ops directors that we interviewed, and she was like, Look, anyone who's going to come in now, I will give a shout out to Mike karma. They're the ones she had talked about in terms of being the best partner. She was like, anyone who's going to come in and try and sell us, AI is going to need to work hand in hand with us, and we will pilot it. Because she said that same thing. She said, Anyone coming in from the outside is not going to understand the intricacies that are needed within this space, Paul J Daly: 12:30 but they're going to think that they do. They're going to think the hard part. Yeah. So she Laurie Halter: 12:33 was saying, like, I think for AI vendors, or, you know, anyone out there a sales force, they need to really be like, understand the space and be willing to collaborate with us as they build it. Because, you know, anyone just coming in with an overall solution, it's just too intricate. Pit stops and automotive in general, it's just too intricate. There's too many steps. The other thing we heard is they really, and we've heard this for tech till we'll hear till the end of tech streamline. They're just like, we don't want one more plugin. Please, please, please, build into, you know, our our existing systems, so we don't have to just add one more thing on top of the DMS. I Paul J Daly: 13:14 want to go back to one of the things you said. I've, I've never heard of yet to hear this the first time where I saw somebody directly or heard somebody directly tie deploying AI to helping with the technician shortage. Unpack that for a minute. Laurie Halter: 13:30 Yeah. So, so this is fascinating. I mean, I think I was reading in the report. Now, don't quote me, but I think it's something like, we're, we're at a 600,000 person technician, technician shortage. Unknown: 13:46 Problem. Paul J Daly: 13:49 Hold on, it says roughly in 20 as of 2022, there were 733, techs employed. But industry forecast project a need for 1.346 by the end of this year. Right now, yep, leaving a shortfall of over 600,000 600,000 Kyle Mountsier: 14:06 short fall, my Laurie Halter: 14:07 goodness, crazy, right? And we're hearing that. I mean, we're hearing that, you guys, for sure, are hearing that. I'm sure I hear that every day. Automotive News is doing stories on that all the time. So one way that AI can really help with that is by speeding up the process, by getting in there and saying, this is kind of the predictive maintenance and parts we were talking about as well. If we can say, if AI can say, we know this amount of cars come in at this time needing this individual repair, then we're better able to stock the parts. The technicians are better able to fix the problem if they've got the AI tools in their space that are even like, let's take a simple you know, the video walk around for the consumer that's going to speed up the consumer saying, Yes, this, go ahead, move forward with these. And they have the parts in stock. So I think it will just like, by speeding up the entire process, they're going to help. Hire more technicians, speed up their workload, and have them get more done on a daily basis to increase that output. But it's a massive problem that we as an industry are kind of burying our head in the sand, to be honest. Well, Paul J Daly: 15:13 you're trying to help that i Who are the people you know? The report is out, who are the people that seem to be the quickest adopters of the information in here. Who are the people that are reading it, first, feeding back on it, first out Unknown: 15:28 of like, dealers, vendors Paul J Daly: 15:29 or investors? Yes, yeah. And even when we say dealers, if you could break that down when we get to the dealers part, who in the dealership? So vendors, 100% Laurie Halter: 15:38 Yeah, yeah. Vendors, 100% what I was surprised that is a lot of principles. It's actually the principles and the general managers that are downloading. We thought it'd be a lot of the fixed ops directors. But it's truly like from the download side, because we see all the downloads that are coming in. It's like group dealership, group heads and things. So I think that Paul J Daly: 15:58 kind of makes sense, though, because you think of like, the closer you get to the front line, the more things you have on your decision area to deal with today. Laurie Halter: 16:06 Yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, the vendor guide is, like, I said, a great resource, because we, Chris who put our research together, has like, tons of checklists and like options, and here's the feature, and here's a little bit about the company. So if they're just getting into AI and they're really feeling overwhelmed, it's a great resource to just kind of give you, like, a broad spectrum of the space. And here's the people who can are here to help help you with it. So yeah, I would say on the dealership side, 100% like the owners are the ones reading it over, the fixed ops Kyle Mountsier: 16:37 directors, yeah. And it's interesting, though, because, like, and this is where I'm really intrigued, specifically along along AI and and in the service drive, like, your average technician isn't spending probably, you know, I would say I spend an average of two hours a day in an AI tool for, like, personal or business use, right? And so spending time in other industry, in in, like, global industry, AI tooling, yeah, can, if you're not doing that, can create a gap. I, I guess my question would be like, who is spending the time in the tools, right? If, if, if the dealer principal and people like that, are trying to think about, how do I use this? How do, how do my people leverage this? You know, when it, when it comes to, like, the adoption across the the dealership operations, that's going to be a hard one to press down. I imagine that, like, this is an education framework that probably needs to get driven into the dealership other rather than just being kind of a research thing, right? It's like, how do you, how do you see that coming out as as you explore, like, how to give this research to the industry you're you're thinking about, like, how what other avenues Can I do this? How do you how do you explore giving it more deeply into the store where everybody in the store is, like, ready and waiting for this? Laurie Halter: 18:07 Yeah, I think that's such a good question. I mean, like I said, I think it's going to have to be principle and top down, which is why we're seeing the group owners like, reading the downloading the research, because, like anything else, it's just really going to have to take the owners that are saying, Okay, we actually can't ignore this anymore. We need, we really need to move forward with this. I was just speaking the other day with the dealer owner who I won't mention, but you know, I said, Would you be interested in talking to me about this research and giving me kind of the dealer perspective? And he said, to be honest, Lori, I talked to you, but we're not doing any of it in our dealership. So I think, like the adoption, while I would love to push this research into every area of the dealership, I think the adoption starts at the very top, and you have to have a dealer, owner or principal who's like, we're going to do this, and I'm going to be the champion of it. Because Paul J Daly: 18:57 you know what's going to happen is that, if they're not saying that now is they're going to go to a 20 group meeting, or they're going to come back and not just one, but like, three or four of the people in the 20 group meeting are going to be, you know, opening up the books and showing the difference, and then that dealer principal is going to come back and be like, Hey everybody, why aren't we using AI? Yes, right? We need give me some AI right now, right? And give me some AI. Why I'm waiting for that, right? Yep, yep. 100% Laurie Halter: 19:24 like, totally. Williams is another one we interviewed. You know, he's a great big so such a smart guy. And he's saying, like, I don't care, the AI tool can do, can make us as fast as possible, could, like, send out. He goes. He was, like, at the end of the day, I'm, I'm very concerned about customer experience. How is it helping our customer experience period? And if it's not, and they're just talking about speeding up the process and, like, you know, online scheduling, he's like, I don't care. Come in. Show me how it helps with our customer experience from beginning to end, and then maybe we'll give you a chance. Paul J Daly: 19:57 It makes a lot of sense. So I Laurie Halter: 19:58 think the other and. Answer to your question. Kyle beyond like, who's going to do it in the dealership? The vendors who are most interested in getting into the space need to truly collaborate and partner with their early dealerships that they're going into. So it gets back to what Ali was saying, like, vendors, if you're interested in truly helping in this space, go find a couple dealerships that are willing to collaborate with you as you build it out. I think that's going to be so key. Kyle Mountsier: 20:24 Yep. All right. So wait before you Oh, you had last one. I did. I wanted to know what the next research paper is. What are you researching? Right? You got I gotta know, like, what? What can we look out for? Do you know what's on the horizon? Paul J Daly: 20:38 Ratio of people in a company who wear flat broom black hats to work every day. Profitability over time? How did you know, 100% Laurie Halter: 20:48 no, we're looking at a couple different you know, a lot of people that were like, retail AI and stuff reach out, were like, Hey, we're not part of the report. I don't think we're going to go right into another AI report, because I think, you know, we've done one tons of interest in the OEM process, and how do vendors get involved in the OEM certification process? And, like, what does that look like? So we might, we might go into something like that. We the the honest, truthful answer is, we haven't decided yet, but we try to do research based on trends. So like the CDK breach, we did cyber security. I heard more and more and more across the industry that AI in the Service Drive is being adopted faster than anywhere else. So it typically the nucleus kind of is driven by things we're just hearing in the industry or big trends that are happening right now. Kyle Mountsier: 21:33 Very cool. Well, Laurie, kudos to you for pulling these together. I think it's awesome research. We'll make sure that the show notes are riddled with with how to get these. Where can people go? Like, give the audio listeners a landing spot for these. Laurie Halter: 21:48 Probably the easiest thing to do is go to my website, which is www dot charisma, communications, com, and at the top bar there's AI in the service drive. Like, Paul J Daly: 21:57 easy, easy, easy Kyle Mountsier: 21:59 to go, good. Well. Lori, thank you so much for hanging out with us. It was fun talking with you and like dreaming up what AI is gonna look like and how people can use it. And thanks for joining us here on auto Collabs. Unknown: 22:11 Thanks so much. I really appreciate it, guys. Kyle Mountsier: 22:17 Okay, I'm actually really impressed that a PR firm saw it fit to go, Hey, look, how do we talk about solutions that are much more broad than maybe even the thing that we do every single day, and dive into a topic like how AI is going to be leveraged throughout the dealership? And I think, you know, it serves the industry in a very unique way, the way that they went about the research, the third party impact of it, and it's a lot of the things that you know, we've been talking about, but really put in a very well thought out clear way, so that operators industry partners can even be thinking about how to bring AI tools to market and serve the dealer and serve the customer in a really great way. Yeah. Yeah, Unknown: 23:00 something. Go ahead. No, you go no, you're probably better. Okay, fine. I'll go for you. Interesting. Michael Cirillo: 23:09 What comes to my mind is this kind of a validation around the fact that there are those of us, the three of us included, who are having active conversations and playing around with and implementing AI in a variety of different, I guess, methodologies. And we have conversations that can sometimes be challenging, because it's kind of assumed that everyone is seeing it the way that we're seeing it and doing it the way that we're doing it. And so we end up actually talking to a small microcosm of people that are early adopters, that are forward thinking, or whatever it might be. And then, you know, to her point, hey, like most of the industry that we're finding right now likes hearing about it, but they're kind of not implementing, are they doing it right? Yeah. Unknown: 23:56 And that kind of brings the bigger picture into into view, which is, I think that's going to be the way it is. I mean, every second scroll on reels for me is some AI expert, you know, preaching about the cautioning against the impending doom of the world and and then so it seems fast for me, but her, you know, some of the stuff that she's brought up these different stages of adoption and, and all of those sorts of things that we're seeing in the industry kind of just reminded me, like, Ah, it's moving fast for us because we're in it. We're like, in a driver's seat, Paul J Daly: 24:27 but not everybody else. That's so true. And every time you you show someone, and this is going to this demographic of people who don't use it are going to get smaller and smaller really quickly. But still, there's so many people. I mean, how many times a day do you witness or hear something where you're like, I mean, you could have just done that in like, 30 seconds, right? It's painful, right? It's hard. Like I asked Kyle the other where were we last week and and we want, oh yeah, we walked into a we walked into a restaurant like a fast cow. Do you ever look at the world and I'm like. I'm like, yeah, that purple on that board is wrong, and why is that there? And then I said to Kyle. I was like, isn't it? Don't you just wish you could shut off the analysis that happens whenever you walk into a business. He's like, it's brutal, like, efficiency analysis, design analysis. But again, back to your point, Michael, the stages. I think that is one of the most important parts of the conversation that she was talking about, what is stage 1234, we need to get people into at least testing the waters in stage one so we can move them through and so we hope that you check out the report. We're gonna link it in the comments so that you can get to it. Lori is really easy to find to online. I'm sure she would love you connect with her on LinkedIn or otherwise. But our time for here, for now is done so on behalf of Kyle Mountsier, Michael Cirillo and myself, thanks for joining us and the charismatic Lori holster on auto Collabs. Unknown: 25:51 Sign up for our free and fun to read daily email for a free shot of relevant news and 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 lab.