A.I. Expert: Rise of the A.I. Employee in Car Dealerships - Eric Rea

All that mattered to us and all the matter to them is like, can you help me move vehicles? Again, it's not like you're going to walk into a dealership two years from now. There's going to be no one there. Like you still want to test drive something. You don't want to just like buy a car site unseen from like looking at videos on the internet and with the right context on the right training, an AI agent can answer the phone schedule appointments, basically do everything.

对我们来说很重要的事情，对他们来说也是一样重要的，比如你能帮我搬车吗？再说了，你不会在两年后走进一个汽车专卖店，发现里面一个人都没有。你还是会想要试驾一下车子的，而不是仅仅通过在网上看视频就决定购买。在适当的背景和训练下，人工智能代理可以接电话、安排预约，基本上可以做所有事情。

Hey, big thank you to our sponsors for making today's episode possible. Card dealership guy news, Uber and podium. And now let's get into the show. Eric Ray on the CDG podcast. Welcome.

嘿，非常感谢我们的赞助商让今天的节目成为可能。感谢汽车经销商新闻、优步和Podium。现在让我们进入正题。欢迎收听CDG播客的节目，我是Eric Ray。

Hey, how's it going? You all see good. Our conversation about media, social media in the past 10 minutes could have been a podcast on its own. I know. I know it's a great way to start. Good to have you on my friend. I hear you have some, uh, some automotive blood in your background. My dad had a bunch of gas stations and he sold used cars off the lots. And I think where our stories converge is I, I like, get out of here. Well, my, I never took, I never took over my dad's business because it was in Canada. I want to move to the United States. So I moved to the US and studied information systems computer science and, and ended up, but it ended up getting back to local business and use cars and now the, you know, a lot of OEM dealerships too.

嘿，最近怎么样？你们看起来都不错。我们刚才这10分钟关于媒体和社交媒体的对话完全可以单独做成一个播客。我知道，我知道，这确实是一个好的开始。很高兴有你在，我的朋友。我听说你有一些汽车行业的背景。我爸有很多加油站，还在场地上卖二手车。我想我们的故事在这里汇合了，真是不可思议。嗯，我并没有接手我爸的生意，因为那是在加拿大，而我想搬到美国。所以我搬到了美国，学习了信息系统和计算机科学，不过最后还是回到了做本地生意和二手车，现在也涉及到很多OEM经销商。

Okay. So your dad was in the automotive business, right? Like you just mentioned, you got into tech. Right. So there's some, there's some similar threads there. What, what, what got you into tech? And by the way, now you're creating tech for dealerships. We'll get to that too. But what actually brought you this world? Always want to do something. It's software. Always wanted to start my own business. And at the time, I mean, this is like 2013 when I was living in Vienna, my dad would call me like every month. And my dad doesn't know technology at all. He's like, probably like your dad. He like barely knows how to use his iPhone, but he would call me like once a month and he'd be like, Hey, Eric, somebody just left me a one star review. On Yelp or Google. And what do I do? He's like, somebody called me an asshole on Yelp. I'm like, well, I can see why. But I'm like, you have thousands of customers that like you. So just go get them to leave your review and you'll be fine. And the reality was he had like 15 reviews on every review site, which first of all didn't make him look like a good business or didn't make him look like a legitimate business that'd been around for 20 years. But second of all, like the only people that were going online, leaving him reviews were people that had felt like they got ripped off or whatever. Like people that just, you know, even in the car business, like by the way, yes, it's it's the classic case, right? It's, you know, you see the only the bad, you know, the good, you know, by the way, I'll tell you, I'll tell you something we used to do. I used to encourage people not to leave me a five star review, but to write their about their experience because I knew that that Google at the time, like would rank at higher. So I said, Hey, like, you know, don't don't feel black to leave five star, like leave whatever you'd like. Just write about your experience, you know, truly, like if there's even one thing that was wrong, like chop a star. So what happened, people would leave like three four star reviews, but the actual review was great. And that got ranked higher. I don't know how the Alga works today, but it was a real issue. So anyways, go ahead.

好吧。所以你爸爸以前是做汽车行业的，对吧？就像你刚提到的，你进入了科技行业。对，有一些相似之处。是什么让你进入科技行业的？顺便说一下，现在你正在为经销商开发科技产品，我们之后会谈到这个。但到底是什么让你进入这个领域的？你一直想做什么？软件开发？一直想创业吗？在那个时候，我是说大约2013年，当时我住在维也纳，我爸爸每个月都会给我打电话。我爸爸对科技完全不了解，可能就像你的爸爸一样，他几乎不会用他的iPhone，但他每个月都会打电话给我说，“嘿，Eric，有人给我留了一星评价。是在Yelp还是Google上？我该怎么办？”他会说，有人叫我混蛋。我说，我能理解为什么。但我说，你有成千上万的客户喜欢你。所以去让他们给你留评价，你会没事的。实际上，他在每个评价网站上只有大约15条评价，这首先让他看起来不像一个经营了20年的好企业或合法企业。其次，唯一会在线上给他留评价的人感觉好像是那些被他坑了的人或者其他什么人。即使在汽车行业，这也是典型的情况，对吧？你只会看到差评而忽略好评。顺便告诉你，我以前经常鼓励别人不要给我留五星评价，而是写下他们的经历，因为我知道当时谷歌会把这些评价排得更高。所以我说，嘿，不要觉得必须留五星评价，随便留你喜欢的评价，只要写下你的真实经历。实际上，如果有哪怕一个地方不满意，就扣掉一星。结果是人们会留三四星的评价，但评价内容实际上是很好的，这样排名更高。我不知道现在算法怎么运作，但那时候确实是个问题。反正，你继续说。

Yeah. No, totally. It that you are you were right because the the algorithm takes into account all the content that's written, not just the star rating. And so you're that was really smart. So yeah, anyway, my dad, I thought my dad and his this type one tire shop he had. He had sold his other gas stations, one tire shop. He had was doing like three and a half million of gross revenue a year. So pretty good business, but like I thought if my dad's tire shop has this problem, I'm sure hundreds of thousands of other businesses have the same problem. And so I got together with my co-founder, Dennis, and we were buddies in college. And I'm like, Hey, we should this is like a week after coming back to the United States from Austria.

是啊。没错，确实如此。你说得对，因为算法不仅考虑星级评分，还会分析所有写下的内容。所以你确实很聪明。对了，说到我爸爸，我记得他的那家轮胎店，他把其他的加油站都卖了，只留下了一家轮胎店。那家店的年收入大概有三百五十万美元。所以生意还不错，但我想如果我爸的轮胎店有这个问题，肯定有成千上万的其他企业也有同样的问题。所以我就和我的联合创始人丹尼斯（我们在大学时是好朋友）一起商量，我说，这次回美国是从奥地利回来后一周。

And I was like, Hey, we should start a company that helps businesses get reviews because the thing we realized is like, whether you're a dealership or a plumber or whatever, any like blue collar. Local business people just unless you're like a hip restaurant, people aren't going online and leaving reviews. And so unless they have a bad experience. And so we made this, we built this super simple long story short. We built this super simple product where you just put in the phone number of the customer at the end of the, like as you're checking them out.

于是我想，我们应该创办一家公司，帮助企业获取客户评价。因为我们发现，无论你是汽车经销商还是水管工，或者其他本地的蓝领企业，除非你是一家潮流餐厅，否则人们一般不会在网上留下评价，除非他们有不好的体验。于是我们就做了这个超级简单的产品，简单来说就是：在结账的时候，你只需要输入客户的电话号码就行了。

And at the end of the transaction, you press send and it would send them this text message and then they would click this link and leave a review on Google Yelp or Card and Guru's or wherever. And we, we built this thing and we started going door to door and like people, it just started taking a look at the end of the day. And we started taking off because this was 2014, like 2014, we'd go into legit OEM dealerships and they wouldn't even necessarily know that their reviews were showing up right up the top of Google and people Google their name. And so, and that quickly, quickly changed.

在交易结束时，你按发送按钮，它会向他们发送一条短信，然后他们会点击这个链接并在Google Yelp或Card and Guru's等平台上留下评论。我们开发了这个功能，并开始挨家挨户推广，结果很快就火起来了。那是在2014年左右，我们去一些正规的汽车销售商店，店主甚至都不知道他们的评价会直接显示在Google顶端，当人们搜索他们的名字时就会看到这些评价。这种情况很快就改变了。

And so we built this product, we went door to door and basically for the first year for the all of 2014, we were just going to these business, initially just going to any business. And then we were just going in on like OEM dealers and other some other verticals, but we just would go in every day, drive, drive around Salt Lake City and all the other cities around there and just sell, sell, sell, sell, and then get home at night and build the product and do it again. Let's fast forward now 10 years, right? A lot has changed. I mean, even when I launched my prior company, there was digital retailing tools were, you know, much more nascent than they are today. It was a whole different world, right? The car business has been evolving much more rapidly than ever before, if you ask me. From your perspective, like what has changed the most if you had to compare, like when you started to today, right? Where are we today in the state of automotive technology, right? That you're privy to. What has changed? Where are we at today?

这段话的意思是：“当时我们开发了这个产品，每天挨家挨户跑业务。基本上在2014年的整个第一年里，我们去拜访各个商家，一开始是任何行业的商家，后来集中在OEM经销商和其他一些垂直领域。每天我们都会在盐湖城及周边的城市开车到处跑，不停地推销我们的产品。白天干完这些，晚上回到家继续完善我们的产品，第二天再重复这个过程。现在，让我们快进10年。很多事情已经发生了很大变化。即便是在我创办前一家公司时，数字零售工具还远没有今天这么成熟。那时的世界和现在完全不同。如果你问我，汽车行业的变化比以往任何时候都要迅速。从你的视角来看，如果你要比较当初和现在，变化最大的是哪些地方？在你熟悉的汽车技术领域，我们现在处于什么样的状态？有什么变化？我们现在在哪里？” 这样翻译后，意思表达得比较清晰易懂。

Yeah. So we start with reviews. We realize that like being a point solution in any business and especially automotive is not the key. So we spent the next nine years building out this huge communication platform with phones and messaging and all these different things. And today, the biggest thing is, I mean, this is what we're going to talk about probably for the rest of the episode because it's just blowing everybody's minds is like, AI's gotten to a point where it can do the jobs of regular humans. And that sounds so crazy to say because even two years ago, that wasn't the case. But like, that is, I mean, the thing is for every business, but especially for OEM dealers is like, at least what we hear from them right now, the two biggest things are conversion. Like you got to convert leads right now because there are fewer of them than there have been in the last couple of years and then training and staffing. And AI, if done well, solves both of those problems in a significant way.

好的。我们首先从评论开始。我们意识到在任何业务特别是汽车行业中，仅仅提供单一解决方案并不是关键。所以我们花了接下来的九年时间构建了一个庞大的通信平台，包括电话、信息等各种功能。如今，最大的亮点是——我们可能会在这一整集节目中讨论的内容，因为它真的让大家感到震惊——人工智能已经发展到可以完成普通人类工作的地步。这听起来很疯狂，因为就连两年前还没有这样的情况。但现在，对于每个业务，特别是对于原厂设备制造商（OEM）经销商来说，目前我们听到他们最大的两个问题是转化率和培训与人员配备。人工智能，如果运用得当，可以大幅解决这两个问题。

And so that's just like crazy. You said you said three big things here, which I want to dig into each of them. The first thing you said is that you, you are seeing, and again, you're the founder, CEO of this company. So you clearly have a comprehensive view, but you're seeing that AI is actually replacing people. So let's just start there. What are you really seeing in the market today? Like, how is this happening from your perspective?

这真是太疯狂了。你刚才提到了三个重要的事情，我想逐一深入探讨。首先，你提到你看到——而且你作为这家公司的创始人兼CEO，显然有全面的视角——你看到人工智能实际上正在取代人类。所以让我们从这里开始。你现在在市场上究竟看到了什么？从你的角度看，这种情况是如何发生的？

Yeah. So a great example of a cardiature group that works with us. First of all, we have 7,000 OEM dealers that work with us in the United States and Canada. And so we've got a third of the market uses podium in some form, some form or fashion. And so we get a lot of data. What we're seeing, good example is we have a 20, I think almost 20 location dealer group in the Midwest. And they've been using our AI employee Jerry, that is a BDC agent, BDC employee. And they've been using Jerry for like nine months since the beginning of the year. And they are, you know, typical dealership has, you know, a couple from like two or three up until 15 BDC reps, depending on their size. And this particular dealership's opening up three dealerships this year. And their plan is to have one BDC human employee. And then that person will basically manage Jerry, our AI BDC employee that can handle all of the inbound leads, schedule test drives and do so much more. So like it's, it's truly changing the way that these these dealerships run and making them more efficient and helping them convert at a higher rate.

好的。以下是这段话的中文翻译，尽量表达意思并易于阅读： “对，一个很好的例子是一个与我们合作的汽车经销集团。首先，我们在美国和加拿大有7000个OEM（原始设备制造商）经销商与我们合作。所以有三分之一的市场以某种形式使用我们的平台。因此，我们获得了大量数据。一个很好的例子是，我们有一个位于中西部的经销商集团，他们有大约20个营业地点。他们从今年年初开始使用我们的AI员工Jerry，Jerry是一个BDC（业务开发中心）代表。一般来说，典型的经销商会有两三个到十五个不等的BDC代表，视其规模而定。而这个特定的经销商今年将开设三家新店，他们的计划是只聘用一个BDC人类员工，这个人负责管理我们的AI员工Jerry。Jerry可以处理所有的入站线索、安排试驾等等。因此，这确实在改变这些经销商的运营方式，提高了效率，并帮助他们以更高的转化率达成交易。”

What's changed about like the state of technology that has enabled this experience to be, you know, so much better to the point where you're saying it's replacing humans. And what I mean by that is like historically, if you think about a chatbot, right, chatbot historically, it's a very low quality experience, right? It's not human. It doesn't really answer your questions. It's, it can give you the price of a car, but like, you know, it's just not that sophisticated. So what has changed? Like, why, why do you believe that this is now like really the next frontier and like, what's, what's different?

这段话翻译成中文并易读表达的意思是： “是什么让技术的发展使这种体验变得如此出色，以至于你认为它可以取代人类。我指的是，从历史上看，聊天机器人，嗯，过去的聊天机器人体验非常低质，对吧？根本不像人类，它并不能真正回答你的问题。它可能可以给你车的价格，但说实话，它并不那么复杂。所以，究竟发生了什么变化？为什么你现在认为这是下一片新的领域，具体有什么不同？”

Yeah. So we, I mean, just the, the, the, the large language models are so much better. We've been working with. So little, little history. We went through Y Combinator, which I know you know what that is, but for anybody that doesn't, it's a premier accelerator, probably the best one in the world, like Airbnb, Dropbox, OpenAI, like all these companies have gone through it. We went through it in 2016 and actually fun fact, OpenAI was in our batch. So OpenAI was in the same batch as us, but at the same time, Sam Altman, who's the CEO of OpenAI, he was the president of YC at the time. So this is like his side project in 2016, OpenAI. They've done slightly better than us at podium, but that's okay. But anyway, 2016, people don't remember this, but in 2016, Facebook, they had their big developer conference and they were touting that like the world of chatbots was like the future of Facebook. Do you remember this? Like there were chatbots for games and chat like that. They basically made this huge push into chatbots in 2016. And at the time, we were mostly doing reviews, but we were getting into text messaging for dealerships and helping them increase their conversion rate through better communication channels. And we wanted to pivot our whole company. At the time, we were the highest revenue generating company to ever go through Y Combinator. And so we were doing well. And we wanted to pivot the entire business to become a chatbot company. Like, who's were like, hey, like AI, this could be interesting and you could like be more efficient, but the reality was it sucked. Like any chatbot experience in 2016 was horrible, way worse than talking to a human.

好的。我来翻译一下： 是这样的。大型语言模型现在已经好很多了。让我们来回顾一下历史。我们曾经参加过Y Combinator的加速器项目。我知道你知道这个，但为了让其他人了解，它是一个世界顶级的加速器项目，比如Airbnb、Dropbox、OpenAI这些公司都曾参与其中。我们是在2016年参加的，有趣的是，OpenAI和我们是同一批的。当时OpenAI的CEO Sam Altman也是Y Combinator的主席，所以2016年时OpenAI还是他的一个副项目。他们在OpenAI的表现比我们在Podium好一些，但这没关系。 回到2016年，很多人可能不记得，Facebook在那年举行了一次大型开发者大会，他们声称聊天机器人是Facebook的未来。你是否记得？当时有各种游戏和聊天的聊天机器人。2016年，Facebook大力推动了聊天机器人发展。那时候，我们主要做评论业务，但也开始帮助汽车经销商通过短信提高转化率，并改善他们的沟通渠道。我们想要转型整个公司。当时我们是通过Y Combinator的收入最高的公司，因此我们经营得很好。我们想将整个业务转向聊天机器人公司，因为觉得AI可能会很有趣，可能会提高效率，但实际上，当时的聊天机器人的体验非常糟糕，远不如与真人对话。

And so what's changed is, you know, OpenAI and others have realized that if you build these massive, large language models, they can be really smart. They can be really, really good at conversing. And then with companies like podium and others, if you can get those AI models to follow a path to a goal, like a test drive or conversion, it basically can do the same job and probably a little better than a human. Now, tell me about the application. So you mentioned conversion, right? That was one of the points you mentioned of within the dealership, how you're impacting. Like, what are the real, what are the real applications right now that most dealers are adopting? Like, what's working? Can you quantify? Like, how is it working to give us a little more insight into that?

所以，发生了什么变化呢？你知道，OpenAI和其他公司意识到，如果你构建这些巨大的、大规模的语言模型，它们可以非常智能。它们在对话方面真的非常、非常出色。而对于像Podium这样的公司，如果你能让这些AI模型遵循一个路径达到一个目标，比如试驾或转化，它基本上可以完成同样的工作，甚至可能比人类做得更好一些。现在，告诉我应用情况。你提到了转化，对吧？那是你提到的一个在经销商店里你们产生影响的例子。那么，目前大多数经销商正在采用哪些实际应用呢？哪些是有效的？你能量化一下吗？比如，它是如何工作的，能给我们更多的见解吗？

Yeah, so we have a thousand, we have about a thousand dealerships using one of our AI employees today. And we just launched, I mean, we launched Jerry, we call him in beta in January and then went full, full release in like March. But so what we're seeing is on average, 30% increase in up to 30% increase in conversion rate. And the reason why, I mean, that sounds crazy, right? Like, if I go to a dealer principal and tell them I can increase your conversion rate by 30%. What type of conversion? I tell them like sales conversion. Two sales. And here's why. It's not, we're not, it's not that the AI is so much better at explaining the cars are so much better at converting. It's just the fact that the AI employee is always on. So like 10 30 p.m. at night. I'm looking at like, I'll just share an example. I was looking for, I have four kids and I want to truck. And so I want a six seater truck. So I want one that doesn't have a middle console in the front. So I can put one of our kids in the middle, even though I think it's a very dangerous spot. So that's a concern. But I want a six seater truck. And usually when do I search for cars? It's like at 10 30 p.m. at night when I'm late laying in my bed. But guess what? Like every BDC rep is asleep during that time. So the reason why that we can get such higher conversion up to 30%. And I'm not saying every dealership that works with us getting 30%. We're seeing as we survey our customers. It's it can be up to 30% increase in conversion is because the AI employee Jerry is always on.

是的，所以我们现在有大约一千家经销商在使用我们的一个人工智能员工。这个员工我们叫他Jerry，我们在一月份推出了测试版，然后在三月份全面上线。我们看到平均转换率提高了30%。这听起来有点疯狂，对吧？如果我告诉一个经销商主要负责人，我可以把他们的销售转换率提高30%。他们会很惊讶吧？我会告诉他们这指的是销售转换率，即实际完成的销售数量的增加。原因是什么呢？并不是说我们的AI在解释车辆或转换潜在客户方面特别出色，而是因为我们的AI员工始终在线。比如晚上10点半的时候，我举个例子，我有四个孩子，我想买一辆六座卡车，因为我希望前排没有中间扶手，这样我可以让其中一个孩子坐在中间，尽管我知道这个位置很危险。因此我通常在晚上10点半躺在床上查找车辆信息。但问题是这个时候所有的客户服务代表都已经睡了。所以我们能得到如此高的转换率，最高可达30%的原因（并不是每个经销商都能达到30%，这是我们在调查客户时得出的数据）是因为AI员工Jerry总是在线。

So like 10 30 at night. He knows that he knows the inventory. I can text in. Hey, show me all of your car, all of your trucks that have six seats, which actually funny enough that that specific question for a regular BDC rep is very difficult to answer because they have to go through this whole spectrum because that's not one of the standard things that like shows up on the on the on most dealership websites. But the AI Jerry since he's connected to the inventory system of the dealership. He can immediately tell you show you show you give you a list of every single truck they have on the lot and ones that are coming. Coming to the lot that have six seats. So that that alone is creating this massive increase in conversion. And then like after hours and weekends conversion rate on to test drives is going up by. Up to 80%.

晚上大概10点30分。他知道库存情况。我可以发短信，比如“嘿，给我看看你们所有有六个座位的卡车。”这其实有点搞笑，因为对于一般的客户服务代表来说，这个问题很难回答，他们必须查阅一大堆信息，因为这不是大多数经销商网站上显示的标准信息。然而，AI助手Jerry由于连接到经销商的库存系统，可以立即告诉你，并给你提供一份清单，列出他们所有现有的以及即将到达的拥有六个座位的卡车。这种功能本身已经大大提高了转化率，在非工作时间和周末，试驾预约的转化率增加了多达80%。

This episode is brought to you by Uber courtesy transportation is no longer a nice to have. It's a need to have. That's why 80% of dealership respondents agree that providing on demand courtesy rides with Uber has helped retain customers based on Uber survey of 79 organizations in 2023 with central you can request a ride on behalf of your customers, even if they don't have the Uber app. Hard dealerships are loving Uber for business because it's a headache free solution for offering white glove service and seamlessly handling tasks like pickup and delivery of auto parts and replacing shuttles and loaner cars dealers can request one way or round trip rides add multiple riders and locations and even monitor trips in real time. Plus you'll get monthly reports to keep track of everything.

本集节目由Uber赞助。提供礼宾交通服务再也不是可有可无的了，而是必需的。这就是为什么80%的经销商受访者同意，通过Uber提供按需礼宾车服务有助于保留客户。这是基于Uber在2023年对79家组织的调查。借助Central平台，你可以代表客户预定乘车服务，即使他们没有Uber应用程序。许多经销商喜欢Uber的企业服务，因为这是一个无忧的解决方案，可以提供顶级服务，并轻松处理取送汽车零部件和替代穿梭车和借车的工作。经销商可以预定单程或往返乘车服务，添加多个乘客和地点，甚至可以实时监控行程。此外，你还会每月收到报告，帮助你跟踪所有事务。

If you're ready to reduce the costs associated with maintaining shuttles and limit the liability of loaner vehicles. It's time to partner with Uber. Visit t.uber.com slash CDG auto today to learn more or visit the link in the show notes below. Tell me more about the applications like how do you view AI continue to be integrated into the dealership model. Right. You're talking you're mentioning right now customer support or like you know the BDC with actual shoppers, right identifying cars getting information. Are there any other applications right now that are big for you or that you're working on planning on launching like what are dealers asking you for what are the problems that you're trying to solve. Yeah, so I mean it goes back to those two big problems I think that everybody's facing right now it's like training and staffing like no like just generally nobody wants an hourly job now in America it's unfortunate but like nobody wants an hourly job and that's a lot of the jobs that exist at a dealership. And so it's training and staffing and its conversion.

如果您准备减少与维护班车相关的成本并限制借用车辆的责任，现在是时候与Uber合作了。 请访问 t.uber.com/CDGauto 了解更多信息，或查看下方的播客说明中的链接。 关于AI在经销商模式中的应用问题。是的，您提到的是客户支持或实际购物者的BDC（业务发展中心），比如识别汽车信息。目前，您还有其他大的应用正在进行或计划推出吗？经销商们向您提出了哪些需求，您正在解决哪些问题？ 是的，现在大家面临的两个大问题就是培训和人员配置。很不幸，目前在美国，几乎没有人愿意做小时工，但是经销店里很多工作是按小时计酬的。所以，我们要解决的就是培训和人员配置以及提高转化率的问题。

And so we started with BDC because we thought that wasn't really interesting way to prove out this AI concept but then you've got revenue mining. So like they you know the dealerships have so much data and they do you know they have teams that do revenue mining and guess what like if you give if you build a AI employer and agent and you build it with the goal of help of proactively reaching out and doing revenue mining activities. It's really really good because it can access all the data it can it can just it's better in a lot of ways than what humans can do. Take that one step further like when you say revenue mining give me a specific example of like what some dealers are doing right is just like hey podium go find me go find me customers within from all my customer data like what actually happens. Yeah so like a great example is like on the service side you got warranty things on the big one for our dealerships is like Lisa Lisa coming like Lisa's leases are coming due.

所以我们最初选择了BDC，因为我们认为这是一种非常有意思的方式来验证这个AI概念。然后你有了收入挖掘。这就像这样，车行有大量的数据，他们有团队负责收入挖掘。你知道吗？如果你建立一个AI员工和代理人，让它以主动联系并执行收入挖掘活动为目标，那么它会非常出色。因为它可以访问所有数据，它在很多方面比人类做得更好。进一步说，当你提到收入挖掘时，给我一个具体的例子说明一些车行在做什么。是说，让AI去找出所有客户数据中的潜在客户，实际情况是怎样的呢？——是的，一个很好的例子是在售后服务方面，你有保修事项，另一个对我们的车行很重要的例子是租赁到期。当租赁即将到期时，进行跟进和联系客户的工作。

And so going in and finding every single customer whose lease is coming due in the next couple months and we're doing car buybacks or anybody who's bought a car three years ago like those types of things which you know you can hire an agency you can have somebody in that and like creating segments and sending out both messaging campaigns but these the night the thing is like AI has gotten to a point where you can have an AI do that and it's really really good and it's always working and yeah it's just it's it's pretty phenomenal. You mentioned you mentioned I think you said the word warranties and somewhere there. It's just a repair shop service body shop we talk a lot about like the front end like sales you know variable operations. Right that's the that comes to mind first but what about like service and like everything I've heard on AI and the service side has been related to communication is that what you're focused on anything more.

因此，我们正在进入并找到每一位租约将在未来几个月到期的客户，并进行汽车回购，或者找到三年前买车的顾客。你知道，你可以雇佣一家代理机构，让某人来处理这些事情，比如创建细分市场并发送消息活动。但现在，人工智能已经发展到可以代替人来做这些事情，而且效果非常好，并且一直在工作。这真的非常了不起。你提到了保修这个词。我想你提到了维修店、服务中心和车身修理厂。我们经常谈论前端业务，比如销售和可变操作。这些是最先想到的内容。但是，服务方面呢？我听到的关于人工智能在服务领域的应用大多涉及到沟通。这是你关注的重点吗？还有其他方面吗？

Yeah yeah so it's it's pretty similar to the sales side but it's basically like hey people are trying to get service appointments all day long and let's let's have and let's build an AI employee just like. Jerry let's build an employee for the service drive that takes these messages takes these inbound leads and schedules appointments and that's that's basically what it can do and then you know right now podium and our employees do text based communication so email text other social messaging channels but like we're working right now on giving Jerry a voice because it can't like it can it's it sounds like sci-fi and it still feels weird even as a software.

对，是的，这基本上和销售方面非常相似，但主要是说人们整天都在尝试预约服务。让我们打造一个像“Jerry”这样的AI员工，这个员工可以接收信息、处理进来的线索并安排预约。这基本上就是它的功能。现在，Podium和我们的员工都是通过短信进行沟通，比如电子邮件、短信和其他社交媒体渠道。但我们目前正在努力让Jerry拥有语音功能，虽然这听起来像科幻片，作为一个软件开发者，这感觉确实有点奇怪。

I'm a founder to talk about the idea of like a computer talking to our business like our customers customers and but it but it's real like we're seeing the technology I'm sure you watched open AI's demo day a couple weeks ago where they showed Scarlet Johansson's voice or whatever and it's like unbelievable. I'm just about that. Yeah yes I guess it wasn't earlier but yeah like is it gonna is it gonna are people gonna think it's a human? No but like here's the thing if and this is like a thing we use at podium we if we're gonna build an AI employee to do something for a dealership. It has to be better than the alternative current solution so I'll give you an example like if you had the ability to have an amazing a massive BDC team that's available 24 7 that can answer the phone super well trained understands the inventory and schedule test drives that might be better.

我是一个创始人，想谈一谈一个点子，就是让电脑能够像与我们的客户进行交谈一样与我们的业务互动。我相信你几周前也看过Open AI的演示日，他们展示了使用斯嘉丽·约翰逊的声音，效果简直难以置信。我只是对这个非常感兴趣。是的，我猜那不是很早的演示，但它确实令人印象深刻。会不会让人觉得它是人类？不会，但关键在于，如果我们在Podium平台上要构建一个AI员工来为一家经销店工作，它必须优于现有的解决方案。举个例子，如果你能拥有一个非常出色且庞大的业务发展中心团队，这个团队24小时随时待命，接听电话时训练有素，了解库存情况并可以安排试驾，这可能会更好。

Than the day I then Jerry but the reality is that's not the case for any dealerships and dealerships trying to cut costs are trying to be more efficient and so Jerry. The next thing is that the BDC is better and just by the way on the BDC side we most of our dealers find that Jerry has a better test drive conversion rate than their actual BDC reps but that's our core principle like we're not gonna release that is worse than what you currently are doing as a dealer and so on the voice side with service specifically like people are calling it all the time.

比起那天，我更喜欢Jerry，但事实并非如此，任何经销商都是这样。经销商为了削减成本并提高效率而努力，所以Jerry就成为了下一个关注点。下一点是，BDC（商务发展中心）方面表现更好。顺便提一句，大多数经销商发现Jerry的试驾转换率比他们现有的BDC代表要高。然而，这只是我们的核心原则之一：我们不会发布比你们当前做得更差的东西。在语音服务方面，尤其是客户服务，上门咨询的需求总是不断。

They're making appointments are changing appointments they're asking questions and we think that with access to all the data and with the right context and the right training. An AI agent can answer the phone schedule appointments basically do everything that you needed to do to schedule service appointments. You know you mentioned text messaging which is one of the oldest technologies but such an effective tool to get in front of a human customer like we all read our text. I don't know you probably know the exact statistics on like readership rates for text but I can only imagine it's like incredibly high. Is that like fully integrated into your product or like Howard or dealers using that adopting that as much as a normal online chatbot like what are you seeing with texting and how is that working for dealers.

他们在安排预约、变更预约，他们在提问，我们认为如果可以访问所有的数据，并且具备合适的上下文和适当的培训，那么一个AI代理可以接电话、安排预约，基本上可以完成所有你需要做的服务预约事项。你知道你提到了短信，这是一种历史悠久的技术，但却非常有效地能直接接触到客户，因为我们都会查看短信。我不知道你是否知道关于短信阅读率的具体统计数据，但我可以想象其阅读率非常高。这项功能是否完全集成到你们的产品中了呢？或者说经销商们是否像使用普通的在线聊天机器人一样广泛采用这项功能？你看到短信在经销商中使用的情况如何，它是如何发挥作用的？

Yeah we're we are partial to texting that's how we started like we started the business with texting we sent out these review invites like everybody gets text message review invites now like every business sends these out. I don't think we're going to go into the technology hall of fame for this but we believe we were the first company to ever build a product that used SMS to send review invitations and solicit reviews. And so we've been text message first from day one and even when we got into like general communication and web chat and everything like that we had this. Our idea was that live chat was never that great because of the you know the fact that it's some you know not usually somebody that's knowledgeable of the dealership. And so we basically have defaulted text message as the primary communication channel for all the podium products forever. And the reason is as a 99% read rate people don't have like 10,000 on red text in there on their phone. And we just think it's a generally a better experience than live chat or phone calls for the most part. But yeah we're we're huge text messages fan or to huge text message fans but you also do it the right way. So like you don't want to you don't want to have if you're a dealer. You don't want the text message channel to become a spam channel right where you're like getting unsubscribed like and now you can't even send transactional messages to your customers.

我们偏爱发送短信，这也是我们业务的起点。我们一开始就是通过短信发送评论邀请，像现在每个企业都会发送的那种短信评论邀请。我不觉得我们能因此进入技术名人堂，但我们相信我们是第一家用短信（SMS）发送评论邀请并征求评论的公司。所以，从第一天起我们就是短信优先的，即便后来我们拓展到一般的沟通和网页聊天等领域，我们始终觉得实时聊天并没有那么好，通常是因为它不是由了解情况的人来操作。因此，我们一直默认短信作为所有Podium产品的主要沟通渠道，因为它有99%的阅读率，人们手机里不会有像1万个未读短信那样的情况。我们认为相比实时聊天或电话，大部分情况下短信体验更好。总之，我们是短信的忠实粉丝，但你也要正确使用它。如果你是一个经销商，你不希望短信渠道变成垃圾信息渠道，让人们纷纷退订，这样你甚至无法向客户发送交易信息。

I wanted to ask you a little bit about what you're doing how CDK and all this you know cyber security is just I don't think I've heard the term cyber security so many times in our industry ever. And it wasn't just the CDK outages right now we have crowd strike outages the other day which impacted dealers and really defenders which you know indirectly impacts them. But it's been it's been a just crazy how this has gone I mean to the extent that I just went and bought some like cyber security stocks. I'm like I gotta get behind some of these like ETFs because I just think the world's getting crazy. How are you thinking about that as a founder CEO right you mentioned you're working with 7000 plus dealers. You're customer facing product how are you handling stuff like that what are you doing about it.

我想问一下你在做什么，尤其是关于CDK和网络安全方面的事情。我感觉在我们的行业里，从来没听过“网络安全”这个词这么多次。而且这不仅仅是最近CDK停运的问题，前几天CrowdStrike 也停运了，这对经销商和防御者都有影响，间接地也影响了他们。事情发展得如此疯狂，以至于我去买了一些网络安全的股票和ETF，因为我觉得世界变得越来越复杂了。作为一个创始人兼CEO，你是怎么看待这个问题的？你提到你们正在和7000多家经销商合作，你们的产品是面向客户的，那么你们是如何处理这样的情况的？

Yeah so I think first of all for dealers I think redundancy super important and I think a lot of dealerships have learned that over the last month like you. Having multiple systems that you can rely on is super important but for us we're we're lucky I mean we're not immune to cyber security threats but we're really fortunate we've been around for 10 years. And so we're not we're not 30 years old. Like there's a lot of software in the industry that's really old and so cyber security wasn't really a big thing and so they've got this huge amount of technical debt to make sure that they can secure their platform. And so that that's one end of the spectrum.

好的，所以首先我认为，对于经销商来说，冗余系统是非常重要的。我觉得很多经销商在过去一个月里像你一样认识到了这一点。拥有多个可以依赖的系统是非常关键的。对于我们来说，我们很幸运，虽然我们也面临网络安全威胁，但我们已经存在了10年。因此，我们不像那些已经运行30年的软件。很多行业中的老软件，当初网络安全并不是一个大问题，因此他们现在背负着大量的技术债务，以确保他们的平台安全。这就是问题的一方面。

The other end of the spectrum is I'm a brand new company I started a year ago and I'm I've got some like you know AI chatbot or something like that. And I'm so lean and fast that I'm not taking into account the security of the security of my customers data. So I think those are the two ends of the spectrum and you know we're not immune but we've been around we started in 2014 when cyber security and cyber threats were already still a big thing.

另一端的情况是，我是一家刚成立一年的新公司，刚起步，并且我有一些诸如人工智能聊天机器人之类的技术。由于我运营得非常精简和快速，以至于没有顾及到客户数据的安全。所以我认为这就是这个光谱的两个极端。不过我们并不免疫，但我们自 2014 年起运营，那时网络安全和网络威胁已经是个大问题了。

And so we've developed our platform in a way we've always had like a security posture and we have security team and application security engineers and all these different things. Because we know that like there are actors out there that want to access to our platform because we send out messages we have a payments product like we you know we're a product that's attractive to scammers and fraudsters. And so we take it pretty seriously and like you know they're always threats and we're just you know we have a team that manages that but it's like it's a huge thing and again back to dealers. It's not something even really think about it until like you know recent history is like you don't even think it always is this vendor gonna get have a problem and yeah like an afterthought almost right so I'm not saying it should be but it's just not the first thing to wake up in the morning you think about right.

因此，我们开发了我们的平台，一直以来都保持着安全态势。我们有一个安全团队和应用安全工程师等等各类资源。因为我们知道有些人会试图访问我们的平台，因为我们发送信息，也有支付产品，所以我们的产品对骗子和欺诈者很有吸引力。所以我们非常重视这一点，知道总是会有威胁，我们也有一个团队在管理这些风险。但这确实是一个很大的问题，回到经销商这个话题。直到最近，大家根本不会考虑到这个问题，甚至没有意识到供应商可能会出现问题。虽然我不是说我们不该重视，但这确实不是你每天早上醒来首先想到的事，对吧？

Tell me a little bit about if I'm a dealer maybe I'm a client of yours now you clearly have you know really massive market penetration. But what are like give us a little sneak peek into what's next on the roadmap right so today we have these functioning bots which are. You know either supplementing humans or fully replacing right in your case fully replacing other vendors supplementing or fully replacing as well it really depends on the actual application. Like what should I expect as a dealer on how is my dealership going to be run in the next you know year to years as the pace of this tech and AI you know improvement it's it's just gotten the velocities just increased like crazy you see open AI releasing you know new models every like three months or so I mean I'm not I can't even keep track at this point right but what is next as a dealer like very practically speaking how am I going to be retailing cars in like a year two years what's going to change.

你能告诉我一下，如果我是一个经销商，可能是你们现在的客户，你们显然有了非常庞大的市场渗透。但能不能给我们透露一下下一步的计划呢？所以，今天我们有这些功能齐全的机器人，它们要么是辅助人类，要么是完全取代其他供应商，在你的案例中是完全取代。这也取决于具体的应用。作为经销商，我应该期望什么？在未来的一到两年里，随着技术和人工智能的进步，速度已经疯狂加快，你看开放AI每三个月就发布新模型，我甚至都跟不上了。但作为一个经销商，从实际操作角度来看，我在一到两年内如何销售汽车，会有什么不同？

Yeah it's it is wild so couple couple things so I just think it's going to be it's going to be so much different than what even you know people dealers on the cutting edge like early adopters that are adopting AI and really leaning in we see a bunch of our customers doing that but like. I don't even think they understand how much it's going to change the world I mean it's going to change our business is going to change your business is going to change every business out there like it's just.

是的，情况真的很疯狂。我觉得有几件事情是这样的：首先，我认为未来的变化会非常大，即便是那些在前沿领域使用人工智能的早期采用者也未必能够预见。这些人中包括我们的一些客户，他们已经在积极使用AI。然而，我认为他们也无法完全理解这个技术将如何彻底改变这个世界。它不仅会改变我们的业务，也会改变你的业务，事实上，它将改变所有的行业。简直是……

The models if they didn't get any better ever are still good enough today that they can take a lot of the workload of what normal like hourly employees do and I know that sounds evil or like it's going to destroy the economy but like I think what it's doing is it's moving people up into higher level tasks the thing that's not going to do like. A is not great at negotiating and selling and then like creating this emotional connection with the customer so I think the way that the cars are sold are going to continue I think it's going to continue to come down to like a relationship business I think what I can do is it can help the relationship like it can it can help conversion by being quick knowledgeable and.

即使模型没有进一步改进，它们在今天已经足够好，可以承担普通小时工的很多工作负担。尽管这听起来很邪恶，或者说会摧毁经济，但我认为这实际上是在让人们提升到更高层次的任务。比如说，人工智能在谈判和销售方面不是很擅长，也不能与客户建立情感联系。因此，我认为汽车销售仍然会依靠人际关系。但我认为人工智能可以帮助这种关系，比如通过快速、知识渊博地提供帮助，从而提高转化率。

And you know politely persistent is that what we like to call our agent but the way it's going to move is I think you're not like dozens of a employees in your business I think you're not an a I employee for. BDC I can have an employee I am like we talk about revenue mining you're going to have an a I employee for service drive you're going to have an employee for like parts and parts you're going to have an employee like on the finance side like I think you're just going to have. It's weird you're not like dozens of a I employees doing work for you and you're going to have to have a you're going to have like a platform that tells you what they're doing and you know the other thing to. The other thing I would just call out is when we sign this is like a story that's pretty interesting so when somebody first signs up for Jerry. Jerry's going to make mistakes because like we we've tuned Jerry for OEM automotive but that doesn't but every you know this every OEM dealer operates differently like some. If you if somebody asked about a certain vehicle and you don't have it on the lot some dealerships don't want you to don't want to schedule a test drive. Some even if they don't have the car that you want they want you down and they want you to like test drive something else because they can they know they can order in so there's a very two different paths but so Jerry's going to need a lot of training and so we basically tell our customers like hey how long.

你知道我们称我们的代理人为“礼貌的坚持”，但其运作方式是，我认为你不会有几十个AI员工在你的业务中工作。我认为你不会为BDC（业务发展中心）雇用一个AI员工。我就像我们谈论的收入挖掘那样，你会有一个AI员工在服务驱动上工作，你会有一个人工智能员工负责零件和零部件，你会有一个AI员工在财务方面工作。我认为你将会有多个AI员工在为你工作，同时你还需要有一个平台来告诉你他们在做什么。 我还想补充一点，当我们签署合同时，会发生一些有趣的事情。例如，当有人首次注册Jerry时，Jerry会犯错误。因为我们已经为OEM汽车调试了Jerry，但每个OEM经销商的运作方式不同。有些经销商不希望你安排试驾，如果他们没有你想要的车型，而有些即使没有你想要的车，也希望你去试驾其他车型，因为他们可以订购。所以，这条路有很大的差异，因此Jerry需要经过大量的培训。所以我们基本上会告诉我们的客户：嘿，需要多长时间？

Like just as just like when you hire new employee it takes a couple months or couple weeks to get them up and running Jerry's going to be the same like Jerry's going to make some mistakes right out of the box but the nice thing is you can train him. And he you know after you train him once he doesn't make that mistake ever again and I think that's going to become a big thing is like training these AI employees to be specifically really good at what you want them to do for your dealership and then. One other one other quick story on this we had a dealer sign up in southern California for Jerry and they're already putting customer they're using us for messaging and all these other things and they signed up for Jerry and Jerry's pretty not cheap so sign up for Jerry. And after two days call you know emails us as cancel it Jerry made a mistake cancel this Jerry thing keep everything else so we made a mistake and we didn't turn it off. We forgot so are bad but two weeks later.

就像你雇佣新员工一样，需要几个星期或几个月的时间让他们上手。Jerry也会是这样的，刚开始他可能会犯一些错误，但好在你可以对他进行培训。一旦你训练过他，他以后就不会再犯同样的错误。我认为，培训这些AI员工，让他们在你需要的具体工作上表现出色，是非常重要的事情。 再分享一个小故事：我们在南加州有一家经销商签约使用Jerry，他们已经在用我们的消息传递等服务，并且签约了Jerry。Jerry其实不便宜，但他们还是报名使用了。结果两天后，他们发邮件给我们说：“取消吧，Jerry犯了一个错误，取消这个Jerry的服务，其他的保留。”我们犯了个错误，没有及时关闭Jerry的服务。两周后……

There's a we have this partner of ours that's like a consultant in southern California for dealers and the dealer principal I think the GSM called this consultant that was a customer of this consultant or call the consultant that was working with this dealership said hey. Who's who's putting these test drives on the calendar like who's putting these people are showing up for these test drives we have no idea who's setting up. They thought it was this they thought it was this consultant they thought the consultant helps what even stuff and the consultant like looks in the account he sees that Jerry's been like scheduling test drives for two weeks straight. And it's scheduled like a dozen test drives or something like that. And so he tells him like hey it's Jerry goes no no no the dealer goes no. It's like it's not that AI thing it's like somebody's doing this because they're showing up and they're asking like they said that they said that they scheduled a point and they're like he's like no he showed him in podium like. It is Jerry and so they turn it back on because they realize that like this thing's real deal and it's not some like toy. Yeah there's a lesson in there. It's a it's the free trial it always works.

我们有一个合作伙伴，是南加州的一位顾问，为经销商提供咨询服务。某天，一位经销商负责人（好像是GSM）给这位顾问打电话，他是这名顾问的客户，或者是这个顾问正在合作的经销商之一，给这位顾问打电话说：“嘿，谁在把这些试驾安排到日程上？有人在安排这些试驾，但我们完全不知道是谁在做。”他们以为是这位顾问在帮忙安排试驾。顾问查看了账户，发现Jerry已经连续两周在安排试驾，安排了大约十几次试驾。于是他告诉他们：“是Jerry在安排。” 但经销商不相信，说：“不，不，不，这肯定不是AI安排的，一定是有人在做，因为那些人如约而至，并说他们预约了试驾。”顾问在系统里给他们看，确实是Jerry安排的。于是他们重新启用了这个系统，因为他们意识到这个系统真的很有用，不是什么玩具。这里有一个教训：免费试用总是有用的。

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这一集由我自己的汽车经销商新闻CDG News赞助。CDG News旨在帮助您随时了解汽车行业的最新动态。我们不是您典型的新闻机构，我们为您带来简明公正的汽车行业新闻和易于理解的格式。从最热门的头条新闻到播客摘要，从经销商的最佳实践到行业见解，我们都涵盖了。而且这一切都是免费的，没有任何付费墙，就像我们一直承诺的那样。赶快访问CDG.news，就是CDG.news，来看看我们的内容吧。我们非常欢迎您的反馈，告诉我们您的需求，给出您的真实想法，我们在此为您提供真正的价值。所以别再等了，现在就访问CDG.news，或者点击下面的节目说明中的链接。

How are dealers paying for this like are you do you get like co op from manufacturers or houses being funded by dealers. Yes we have a bunch of co op agreements with most of the OEM. Like most of the manufacturers but for Jerry they don't have there's no like AI programs yet so it's we actually had one of the major. We had one of the major OEMs in Utah in our office yesterday and we were talking to them we're like hey look like how are you guys going to create programs for like an AI. BDC and an AI service drive because like this is happening so fast and you know manufacturers aren't the fastest to like. You know get get on board all these technology so yeah we have our main platform and some of our other products like our reviews product reputation management product out our programs but dealers are just coming out of pocket for this right now. And we just chart we just decided. It's funny on the pricing side you can see like outside of dealership tech like with intercom and other like major. Chat providers they're doing like per resolution they're charging like a certain amount per resolution that the AI. Produces and we just decided to go with like a flat rate because I think our dealers dealers want to know what they're going to pay and they don't want to like do a calculation every month to. Understand what their bills going to be. Especially when the first thing that goes to your mind is my competitor going on there running up my bill or something like that or like you know a spam message five times it's a it can get frustrating.

经销商是如何支付这些费用的？比如，你们是从制造商那里获得联合广告费用 (co-op)，还是经销商自行出资？是的，我们和大多数原始设备制造商 (OEM) 有一系列的联合广告协议。然而，对于Jerry来说，目前还没有相关的人工智能项目。所以，事实上，前些天我们有一个主要的OEM来到我们犹他州的办公室，我们和他们讨论了如何创建一个人工智能的BDC（业务发展中心）和人工智能服务驱动程序，因为这一切发展得太快了，而制造商通常不是最快的来接受这些新技术的人。因此，我们确实有一个主要的平台和一些其他产品，比如我们的评论产品和声誉管理产品，但目前经销商是自掏腰包支付这些费用的。 在定价方面，有趣的是，在经销商技术以外的领域，如Intercom和其他主要的聊天服务提供商，他们是按每次解决收费的，AI每一次生成解决方案都会收取一定费用。但是我们决定采用固定费率，因为我们认为经销商们希望知道他们将支付的金额，而不是每个月都要计算自己的账单。尤其是当你首先想到的是竞争对手故意用虚假信息增加你的账单，或者一些垃圾信息反复出现，这会让人非常沮丧。

So I get it like what's the bottom line ROI that dealers are seeing then and I this like you know specific to you can be agnostic to the entire. You know AI chatbot industry which I realize that they're all different in functionality. What do you see as like the bottom line ROI right because you mentioned this isn't right now being co-op by manufacturers right do not subsidizing this for dealers dealers are coming out of pocket but clearly if you work with so many dealers clearly the return is there right or else they wouldn't spend the money. And so what are you seeing as like the bottom line ROI. Yes so like I said before up to a 30% increase in actual vehicle sales. And then up to an 80% increase in test drive conversion after hours so that's like weekends and evenings. That's huge right that's huge and that's we're seeing specific customers like we talked to a customer last week and they were like yeah like Jerry scheduled 11 test drives last night this is a multi location group but like. That doesn't happen without Jerry. Another they said Jerry had helped themselves $600,000 in vehicles last three weeks that was from their platform director and then. Yeah like that's basically it like they're seeing hey conversion after hours is dramatically increasing and then our ability to take a lead and convert it into a sale is increasing by up to 30%. And that's it like I mean our whole business from the beginning even when we were just a reviews point solution.

所以，我明白了，就是说经销商现在看到的底线ROI是怎样的？我知道这可能跟整个AI聊天机器人行业无关，因为它们的功能各不相同。你认为底线的ROI是什么？因为你提到这项技术现在还没有得到制造商的合作支持，也没有为经销商提供补贴，经销商是自掏腰包，但显然，如果这么多经销商都在使用，说明回报是有的，否则他们不会花钱。那么，你看到的底线ROI是什么？ 是的，正如我之前所说，实际车辆销售额可能会增加高达30%。然后售后服务时间——比如周末和晚上的试驾转化率可能会增加高达80%。这非常重要，对吧？这非常重要。我们看到有些客户的情况，比如我们上周和一个客户谈过，他们说：是的，Jerry昨晚安排了11次试驾，这是一个多地点的集团，但这样的事情如果没有Jerry是不可能发生的。另一个例子，他们说Jerry在过去三周内帮助他们卖出了60万美元的车辆，这是他们平台总监的说法。 基本上就是这样：我们看到售后的转化率显著提升，并且我们将线索转化为销售的能力提高了高达30%。这就是全部，从一开始，我们的整个业务就算只是一个评价解决方案。

How do we help dealers sell more cars because we knew like at the beginning early days nobody who we were we had no funding like we've since raised $420 million. We had no funding we started the business with $1,500 cash.

我们如何帮助经销商卖出更多的汽车？因为我们知道在最初的时候，没有人知道我们是谁，我们也没有资金。然而，现在我们已经筹集了4.2亿美元。我们当初创业时只有1500美元的现金。

And so in the early days we're going to these dealerships all that mattered to us and all the matter to them is like can you help me move vehicles and with reviews we could in the early days. That's still really effective but I think it's more commoditized like every dealer knows they have to have like 10,000 reviews on Google and other places but that's like that's the thing.

所以在最初的时候，我们去这些经销商那里，对我们和他们来说最重要的就是看能不能帮他们卖车，而我们通过评论确实能做到。在最初，这个方法非常有效，但现在它变得更普通了。每个经销商都知道他们必须在谷歌等地方有成千上万的评论，但这已经成为一种常态了。

What was what was a like selling to those early dealers like just give us a little play by play how was that like for you. Well at first we wouldn't even go into OEM dealers because we were too scared like we just thought like. We would just go into use dealers at the beginning because they're easier to talk to because it's like two to three guys right.

那时候卖给那些早期经销商是什么样的？给我们稍微描述一下，那对你来说是怎样的体验？ 嗯，一开始我们甚至不敢去找原厂设备（OEM）经销商，因为我们太害怕了。我们觉得还是先找二手经销商会容易一些，因为他们更好说话，通常只有两三个人。

And so we eventually got up the courage to go into a Ford dealership. We just decided to walk directly like bypass every salesperson every reception is just walk back and find the GM's office and just walk into his office. And so we did that we walked in and we like just ignored all the sales reps and walked into this bill this guy bill snake his office.

于是，我们终于鼓起勇气走进了一家福特汽车经销店。我们决定直接走进去，绕过每一位销售员和接待员，直接找到总经理的办公室，然后就这样走了进去。所以我们这么做了，径直走进去，忽略了所有销售员，走进了一个叫比尔·斯内克的办公室。

We walk in we knock on the you know on the doors doors open he's like hey what do you need I'm we're like hey we're from podium we came to talk to you about your reviews. He's like okay sit down and so we sit down and we end up giving him like a 10 minute demo of the product and I mean we didn't really say anything he was just sitting there like no expression and so he says hey can you hold on a sec and he walks out of the door and we thought at the first we're like I think he realized that we didn't have an appointment with him and so he's going to like talk to his GSM and he's going to kick us out and we came back with a check for like four grand.

我们走进去，敲了敲门。门开了，他问：“你们需要什么？”我们说：“我们是来自Podium的，来和你谈谈你的评价问题。”他就说：“好，你们坐下吧。”于是我们坐了下来，给他做了一段大约10分钟的产品演示。演示过程中我们没说太多，他也一直没有表情。然后他说：“等一下。”就走出了房间。我们当时觉得他可能意识到我们没有预约，所以他去找他的经理讨论，可能要把我们赶出去。没想到他回来时带了一张4000美元的支票。

And he like gives us a check he's like we're signing up today this is exactly what we need. And we didn't even tell him it was like up paid up front we usually collected monthly and on a credit card and so we're like okay awesome we just pretended like that's what typically happens and inside we're free.

他递给我们一张支票，说要马上签约，这正是我们需要的。而我们甚至还没告诉他是要预付的，我们通常是按月收取费用，用信用卡支付。所以我们心里想，太棒了，我们就装作这就是常规操作，心里却高兴得不得了。

We're freaking out and so we like kind of just walked out of the dealership like hey cool play cool yeah we're like play cool we'll come back tomorrow and get your team set up and get everything on boarded. We walked out and we got in the car and we like pulled out of the parking lot and then we like pulled over like 200 yards down the road and we're like just started like celebrating because it was like the first time we'd gone into a legitimate OEM dealer and to like walk out with a check for four grand at the time in 2014 just was like super validating that we were building something meaningful. Incredible you're doing incredible work.

我们真的非常激动，所以当时我们就假装镇定地走出了经销商的店，说：“嘿，冷静点，冷静点，明天我们会回来，把你们的团队安排好，把所有事情搞定。”我们走了出去，上了车，开出了停车场。然后我们在大约200码外的地方停了下来，就开始庆祝，因为这是我们第一次走进正规的OEM经销商那里，并且拿到了一张四千美元的支票，那是在2014年。这对我们来说是极大的肯定，证明我们正在做一些有意义的事情。真是太不可思议了，你们的工作真是太棒了。

So you are right now you're really focusing on this AI tool it's bringing lots of efficiency better conversion for dealers. Are there any tools or products or any other ways you're currently working with dealerships anything else you want to share. Yeah we're not okay so we're a couple things coming down the pipe that I think are really interesting so we talked about AI we talked about how we're trying to give Jerry a voice so you can talk on the phone and maybe make phone calls.

所以你现在真的在专注于这个人工智能工具，它为经销商带来了很多效率和更好的转化率。你们现在还有在与经销商合作的其他工具或产品吗？还有什么要分享的吗？ 是的，我们还有一些即将推出的有趣项目。我们已经谈过人工智能，谈过我们如何努力给 Jerry 加上语音功能，这样他可以打电话，甚至进行电话沟通。

And part of I mean we also have a phone system we built over the last four years. And it's the most technical I mean it sounds funny because phones have been around forever but to build a modern phone system that integrates with all of the other tools and market like marketing products reviews product messaging products that we have. It's been a huge technological challenge and so we're we're still pretty early there but our goal is that a dealership uses podium for all of their communication not just messaging not just email but like phones. We want to want to power their phone system and everything.

我们在过去四年里搭建了一个电话系统。这听起来可能有点搞笑，因为电话已经存在很久了，但构建一个能与我们市场上的所有其他工具和产品（如营销产品、评价产品、信息传递产品）集成的现代电话系统，确实是一个巨大的技术挑战。所以我们还处在比较早期的阶段，但我们的目标是让汽车经销商使用Podium进行所有的沟通，不只是信息传递和邮件，包括电话系统。我们希望能全面支撑他们的电话系统和所有交流方式。

And then we want to layer on our AI employees on to all of those different channels and just completely change these dealerships and make them more efficient and more effective. And again it's not like you're going to walk into a dealership two years from now there's going to be no one there. Like like no no employees like there will still be like the cool thing about what we're doing is it it helps like the sales reps.

然后我们想要将我们的AI员工应用到所有不同的渠道，彻底改变这些经销商，让他们变得更高效、更有效率。再强调一下，这并不是说两年后你走进一家经销商，会发现里面一个人都没有，不是这样的。真正有趣的是，我们的AI技术能够帮助销售代表。

It helps them sell more. It helps them sell more cars every month and so I don't think it's going to massively change some parts of the business but for that up funnel. You know you know top of the funnel marketing scheduling all of the logistical parts of running a dealership is going to completely change the game. And that so adding a phone system that's modern because it's also wild you've walked into a lot of these dealers that are doing you know 30 million in sales or more.

这有助于他们卖出更多。这有助于他们每个月卖出更多汽车，所以我认为这不会对业务的某些部分产生巨大变化，但对于销售漏斗的上游阶段。你知道的，营销的顶端，安排经营经销商的所有物流部分将彻底改变游戏规则。并且，添加一个现代化的电话系统是很关键的，因为事实上你走进很多这类年销售额达3000万或更多的经销商时，会发现他们的设备非常落后。

And they're using like an AT&T landline from like 1990 it's crazy. So we think there's a huge opportunity there. I love it. Well we're going to keep close track. This has been great and very insightful and we're going to also I'm going to put the link to podium and your company in the show notes below. So if anyone's interested wants to learn more see what it's all about they can see below. Any closing thoughts before we wrap up. No I just think what you're doing is awesome. I love it. You know the consumer side is really interesting but then also what you're now you're basically making transparent the how the dealership industry like you're making transparent the auto industry and I think it's awesome. And then yeah like we're we're super super excited. I think the world's going to change a lot over the next couple of years and we're just trying to make sure that we build a product that can help dealers keep up with that.

而且他们还在用像1990年的AT&T固定电话，简直太疯狂了。所以我们认为这里有巨大的机会。我喜欢这个。我们会密切关注。这次谈话非常棒，也很有启发性。我还会在下面的节目备注中放上Podium和你们公司的链接。如果有人感兴趣，想了解更多内容，可以在下面查看。在结束之前，你有什么最后的想法吗？ 没有，我只是觉得你们正在做的事情真是太棒了。我喜欢这一切。消费者的一面非常有意思，而你们实际上是在让经销商行业变得透明，让汽车行业变得透明，我觉得这很棒。而且我们超级超级激动。我认为在未来几年里世界会发生很大变化，我们只是想确保我们能够打造一款帮助经销商跟上变化的产品。

How do you think one quick last question how do you think our kids are going to buy cars like take me. I don't know how old your kids are but take me like 10 15 years into the future like will they go to a dealership like how do you think they're going to buy cars. Yeah it's funny because we work in a bunch of different industries working you know jewelers furniture mattress appliance retailers medical spas at home services we have like 100,000 customers across all these in verticals and it is interesting like so many things have already gone online. Like there's you know so many things you would never think of going into a store for today like you just go to Amazon. But there is still this you know any service of course like you can't get your plumbing fixed online but like any retail purchase where it's considered purchase you're spending a lot of money or it really matters that you choose the right thing.

你觉得我们的孩子们将来会怎么买车？比如我这样的人。我不知道你的孩子们现在多大，但试想一下，10到15年后，他们会去汽车经销店吗？你觉得他们会怎样买车呢？ 这很有趣，因为我们在不同的行业工作，比如珠宝、家具、床垫、家电零售店、医疗水疗和家庭服务等，我们在这些垂直领域中有大约10万名客户。现在很多东西已经在线上购买了。例如，现在有很多商品你可能根本不会去实体店购买，而是直接去亚马逊上买。但还有一些服务，比如你显然不能在线上修理管道，而是要亲自找人处理。但对于任何需要慎重选择的零售采购，因为你要花很多钱或者这个选择非常重要的商品，人们可能还是倾向于去实体店。

So I think you know your mattress furniture appliances cars like I think people still want an in person experience like you still want to test drive something. Like you don't want to you don't want to just like buy a car sight unseen from like looking at videos on the internet. So I mean like I think my daughter's eight I think eight from years from now people are still going to be going down to a dealership or or they'll be experiencing a fit they'll be experiencing the vehicle physically in some way. Like I know there are companies out there that are like bringing the test drive to you now and that's pretty cool but like I just think that that stuff isn't going away that's kind of a core tenant of podium is that like a lot of like these. What people call blue color industries are they're not going away like the technology is not going to like. Make them obsolete and that's our whole thing is like we're going to arm those types of businesses with a technology to keep up but yeah I still think you're going to want to test drive a fifty thousand dollar car. Where you put your money where your mouth is so we'll have to take it from there so I love it.

所以我觉得你了解，像床垫、家具、电器、汽车这些物品，人们还是希望有面对面的体验。你还是会想要试驾一下车，而不是仅仅通过网上的视频就买一辆车。我女儿现在八岁，我认为八年后人们依然会去汽车经销商那里，或者以某种方式亲身体验车辆。我也知道现在有一些公司可以把试驾车带到你面前，这挺酷的，但我觉得这些核心体验不会消失，这也是我们Podium公司的一个基本信念。很多人们称之为“蓝领行业”的领域不会因为科技的发展变得过时。我们的目标就是为这些类型的企业提供技术支持，让它们跟得上时代。不过，我依然认为人们在买一辆价值五万美元的车时会希望亲自试驾。这就是我的想法，我非常喜欢。

Eric thanks for coming on this is awesome and really insightful it's great having you on and we'll have to have another conversation sometime in the future after all this goes to the next level so. Yeah thanks done yoshi alright hope you enjoyed that episode please give the podcast a rating consider subscribing to the show and check the show notes for links to what we talked about thanks for tuning in I'll see you guys next time. Thank you.

埃里克，谢谢你来参加我们的节目，这次交流非常棒，让人受益匪浅。很高兴能邀请你参与，我们以后还会再继续讨论，特别是在事情有进一步进展之后。好的，谢谢，Yoshi。希望你喜欢这期节目，请给我们的播客评分，考虑订阅我们的节目，并查看节目备注中的相关链接。感谢你的收听，下次再见。谢谢。