Auto Recyclers are Scaling their Sales Using AI Now

In this follow-up to his packed URG Conference session, Chris Daglis from Auto PARTnered Solutions and Georgia Carver to break down the real-world impact of AI on automotive recycling. The episode explores how AI isn’t just future tech, it’s already here, quietly embedded in tools and processes auto recyclers use daily. They highlight practical, scalable AI use cases including routing systems, inventory grading, and the new voice AI assistant Ari. Chris and Georgia stress that AI isn’t about replacing people, it’s about supporting teams to work smarter, convert more leads, and stop letting valuable calls slip through the cracks. From smart warranties to bilingual voice support, they show how AI is reshaping the customer experience and sales potential for early adopters.

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Transcript

Chris Daglis

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Automotive Recycler's Experience. And again, Georgia. How are you? Is that all we're gonna get?

Georgia Carver  

No, hi. How are you?

Chris Daglis

Good, good, good, excellent. It's a Friday afternoon here in Melbourne and in Sydney. It's a nice, sunny day, so it's good little bit fresh. It's getting a bit cooler now, but it's good to be here again, and we're going to talk a little bit about we've had a heap of interest around the session that I did on AI, and how AI is here now at you? At URG, yeah.

Georgia Carver  

At the recent conference, we've just returned from you URG a couple of weeks ago at Easter, ANZAC Day, a whole bunch of things, so we're just kind of regrouping now, I guess on the back of Yeah, certainly at this conference, I mean, the room was very full. A lot of people have come up and asked questions from you, Kirk myself about, the session.

Chris Daglis 

We've, we've had a lot of people that weren't able to be at the session, sort of come and or send emails and wanted to know a little bit more about one what we're doing, but you know more so about what what our thoughts are, and how AI can help them as well. Unfortunately, we, you know, not everyone's able to be at the sessions. There's a number of sessions on at the same time, and the room is only so big. So we had a good panel there. We had Amber from Pete's Auto Amber Kendrick. We had Junior from Bionic, and also Pat Huesser from Pam's, which was good. So look, we wanted to just jump on this record something so that, you know, we can share a little bit more around where AI is today in the market, we hear a lot about Chat GPT and so forth. It's the one that everyone knows, and I know a lot of people are using it on a daily basis now to to help them write emails and stuff like that. But we use AI in a number of different forms through our normal day to day interaction, we don't really realise it, and I think it's important we sort of start thinking about how a AI fits into an automotive recycling business. So that's why we're here.

Georgia Carver  

Great. Well, why don't we, on that note, why don't we kick off and you kind of give us an overview of, I guess what, what the key points were that you talked about in the session, and I might ask a few questions along the way, that kind of trigger or make us think that that is that may be further worth talking about.

Chris Daglis 

Alright. So I think one of the key things here is the way we think about AI, and what it is, you know, artificial intelligence is, you know, it's, it's in photography, it's in language, it's in text, you know. So we're here, we see a lot of the chat bots, you know, you've got things on on your website that, you know, you get onto an American Airlines or Podium, yeah, all that type of stuff, right? And a lot of those AI or those tools enable people to communicate better with you, okay? And we hear a lot of it. When we call airlines or government bodies, you might hear a fairly simple multi prompt. AI asking a number of questions, and a multi prompt AI is one where it's more like a preset, templated deal, where frequently asked questions, you ask it this question, it knows that it's going to give you that answer every time they're fairly robotic.

Georgia Carver  

We're located at blah blah, blah, blah, blah. It gives the address, yeah, what are your opening out the standard questions? I mean, I know we do that with Podium and things like that, with our clients that use it, we can upload the ask questions, and often that's and in Facebook, meta, we can in there and it'll automatically give them that option.

Chris Daglis  

Yep. So we use that every day, right? A lot of people use that, you know, I just uploaded some new software now, you know, for my Mac computer this morning, it went for about an hour. But anyway, that's another story. But in it came a whole heap of AI tools, you know, to help you with this and that and that. Am I going to use them necessarily? Maybe not. But AI is everywhere, and that's the has been for some time, by the way. And the way we think about AI from an automotive recyclers perspective, I think again, where the laggards, where the where the organ, where the industry that's probably slower to adopt AI than a lot of other industries, obviously, in banking and in finance and other such industries, it's used a lot more than we use it. But I think we need to start thinking more about it, because there are things that we can do and automate in our business to become more efficient and actually do a better job.

Georgia Carver  

What are they? Some of they say. So what are those things? What can you touch on some of those things that you think? I mean, obviously we'll talk a little bit more about Ari, our AI sales agent. But what are those things? Other things, more low hanging fruit that people could be looking at for their businesses, yeah.

Chris Daglis  

So what's there today? And there's some stuff that they've already been using Georgia, right? So if you to think about, you know, Bid Buddy, for example. Now it may not be the AI that we know of today that is the chat GPT type of a but there's AI algorithms in the back end of bit buddy, for example, that help you buy cars better. I think a lot of the stuff that Jim McKinney is doing with his Ezy route for example, or routing systems more generally. You know, that's AI determining Google Maps. That's AI determining how long it's going to take you to get to here, using the information that's available to it, right? And it's gathering a whole heap of information to do that. Yeah. So there's, there are things that you do every day.

Georgia Carver  

What are some that you think you know that maybe people haven't thought of that they could be putting in their facility?

Chris Daglis  

Yeah, and look what I will say is some of this AI is, unfortunately, does require a level of knowledge of how to apply it. So sometimes I'll say some things here, but it's like, how am I going to do that? Is going to be the question. So you could there are certain processes. You know, if you think about different things that a human does and touches on a daily basis in your business, a lot of that can be done by AI. Now, do I mean, replace everyone with AI? No, that's 100% not what I'm saying. Ai should be seen at this point in time as a tool that you can use to help you do your job better, not a tool that can necessarily replace everyone in their business. And again, you mentioned Ari and what we're doing there. I'll talk to that in a minute. But that is really it's not about saying, How do I replace my 100 salespeople? No, it's about, how can I help my 100 salespeople do better? How can I help them increase their conversion rate? How can I make sure I don't miss calls, etc, etc. So it's not, it's certainly not about replacing. I think the first protocol is to say, how do I use it to get a better outcome? Okay? And that can happen from sales. It can happen through, you know, warranty a lot of people you know, for the bigger organisations that you know, sell hundreds of engines a day, for example, if they have, you know, as a symptom of the volume of sales, they're going to have an increased number of warranty claims. It's just normal, right? So rather than having one a week, maybe they have one a day. Okay? So what do I do? Or 10 a day? Whatever the case is, what do I do with those warranty is there some information that I can take right up front using an AI agent that I don't necessarily have to have a salesperson taken because we pay salespeople a lot of money, we want to use their time as effectively as possible, because we are dropping a lot of calls. We're dropping a lot of calls because maybe we're focused on other stuff that's non productive, such as taking invoice numbers and, you know, claim issues down about a warranty. So in the warranty department, you could have, for example, an AI that takes all that information in a very structured way usually does it better because it goes down that structured approach that can then feed through to a warranty assistant, rather than having it to go through your foreign sales room. Yeah, that's one example. 

Georgia Carver  

Okay, so look, let's talk then about Ari, because obviously that was a lot of people were keen to understand more about her, and I know we'll do a specific chat, maybe with Mike or someone next week. Mike Kunkel next week, perhaps about what he thinks of Ari, because he's obviously a traditional sales person, traditional sales coach, so, but he's a very big advocate about Ari. So I think that's great to get the old versus new kind of old way and the new way and talking about that, but in the meantime, I mean, for those who haven't heard, or those who are wanting to know a little bit more, can you touch on who are he is, what are he is? How are he's helping businesses.

Chris Daglis  

Yeah, so again, it's a voice AI that we've developed. It's something I heard at an IBIS collision repair conference about a year ago, and a gentleman from 3M that was on a panel with me about innovation in the collision repair industry. Played an AI voice assistant that collision repairs are using. And when I heard I thought, wow, that's that's pretty amazing. And then the first thing that I do, as you know Georgia is, I think, hold on. Can we use that in our industry? Does that do we have a need for it just struck me straight away. I thought, wow, we need that. I reckon we're missing a lot of calls. Now, that was a hunch I had. Why? Because I remember going into to my family's business on a Saturday to do some inventory, for example, or do whatever I had to do on a Saturday or a Sunday, or whatever the case was. And that phone didn't stop ringing, but no one was there to pick it up. So and it was frustrating because I'm thinking, well, maybe they need an engine, or maybe they need this, but the phone will just ring call after call after call. Let me just go to a message bank, and guess what, they don't leave messages. They either hang up or they leave a long winded message that's not structured, and we don't really know what they want at the end, and sometimes they even forget to give us their number. So I thought there was, there was a need. So we started asking around. And started asking a number of facilities, you know, how many calls are you missing? And again, a lot of people didn't know how many calls are missing. They never thought about it. So they started looking at at that. And surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly, you know, we found that, you know, good 15 to 35, 40% of calls are going unanswered. And that's, that's not a mistake 

Georgia Carver  

Saturday, is that that was, you know, even in sort of peak times, there's overflow. People are on hold. They're either hanging up, they don't want to wait for three, four minutes, whatever it may be, yeah, absolutely.

Chris Daglis  

Calls are dropping. They're either not getting answered because I'm on the phone. When I've got five sales people, I got calls coming in.

Georgia Carver  

And we know that sales people are hard to find. We know that from speaking with our customers. 

Chris Daglis

And expensive, right? And expensive? Yep. So what we want to do is what, what Ari does, is takes those overflow calls and creates in the command center. We've got a command center that people can the sales people can go into, and they can see exactly which calls are being taken in backlog. So they can click on that, open it up, see the call summary, very quickly, read the transcript if they want, listen to the call, if they want, and then call that customer back. So we're not not answering the call, we're taking information. Then that's a lead for the salesperson to then take and turn into an order, right? And I think that's the really important thing they are. And sales people need to look at this as an opportunity whereby they can now take warm or hot leads that have come through, whether that's selling an engine or a train or whatever they were selling, whether they were another call, you know, dealing with a warranty, right, which is crazy, or taking a call because someone wants to talk to accounts, and it came through to them by accident. No, this is a situation. Oh, by the way, it might be a call that came through at midnight, but no one's going to answer. But we take that information the first thing in the morning. We've got sales people there with leads ready to go. They can call them back, they can text them, they can talk to them. They can say, I can help you with that,

Georgia Carver  

Because the summary is there. They can, you know, in theory, they can pick and choose which ones they call as a priority. If there's someone waiting for an engine, they're probably going to call it back before someone's looking for a tail light, but it's not so the tail light won't get called back. It's just that you prioritise that, right? It's a process.

Chris Daglis  

You prioritise accordingly, right? So why would I? Obviously, I'm going to hit the $5,000 engine before I do the $50 taillight. So, yeah, absolutely, it's, it's all there. It's all visible. You can see it. Managers can see it. The salespeople can see it. So it's, it's, again, it's a mechanism by which we can help your team, your business, increase sales, because now we're not missing calls. We're there. 24/7, 365, and if 10 calls come in at once, if 1000 calls, 10,000 calls come in at the same time, none of those go to a message. Ari takes each one of those calls and responses to it or response to it, ask the right questions every single time. 

Georgia Carver  

We've got a couple of yards that are sort of where our first trial yards that tested it out, right? We've got Amber at Pete's and Junior at Bionic, and they were on the panel, yeah, yep. So we've got those yards. Obviously, there's a few tweaks here or there, but essentially, every yard is going to have different tweaks and different adjustments as we've rolled this out to new customers. we've

Chris Daglis  

Since URG, we've had a heap of yards come on since URG, and a lot more in the pipeline that coming on in the next month. But long story short, you know, they're all slightly different, right? So the the the idea is that Ari needs to take on your persona, your company persona, and you know, she represents you, so she'll answer as George's Auto Parts, or you might not want to call the auto

We've got a Jim, we've got a Peter, we've got a Millie. That's Natalie over at Miller's. Natalie and Chris and Sean over at Millers have called it Millie. So we've got a Maria. We've got some people said we want a Texan, Texan accent. So we've built in a Texan accent. There's one really, really good one. Actually, I think it's Jim. He's got a slight Texas Texan twang to his voice, and he's actually a really good voice, yeah. So that works really well, right? So you can have whoever you want.

Georgia Carver  

And speaking about voices, Chris, Ari's been put to the test with her language skills as well. And that was, I think, the Junior, yeah, Bionic, they then we didn't even know that that was already rolled out, and it just, she flipped right. She flipped us.

Chris Daglis  

yeah. So one of the key things that, you know, recyclers, especially in the US, needed, was Spanish speaking. So we said to our look, if someone speaks to you in Spanish, please respond in Spanish. And she responded in Spanish. So that was pretty amazing and we've seen now since then, Georgia saw a heap of calls come through where the customer mentioned speak Spanish, and then Ari started speaking to them in Spanish and transcribe that. Then the summary comes through in English. She she actually translates all that into proper English, into English and then, you know, you can see that. And you know, we're building things into smarts, into the control center, where potentially Spanish speaking calls may end up being assigned to your Spanish speaking salespeople that unfortunately weren't there to take that call. We had a customer just yesterday. They had three of their sales team sick, so they said, We need Ari to take a lot of our calls during the day. So they had a lot of overflow calls. So we enabled Ari an Ari to act as if he's there, and it knows that it's during the day, so that when she takes the call, she doesn't say, we'll ring you tomorrow. It was something along the lines of, thanks for calling Chris's auto parts. Our team's currently on other calls, but I'm here to help you. Please provide this information and someone will call you back really soon. Help them get out of that, that challenge

Georgia Carver  

I'm trying to jump in here, because I've got a recording actually sitting here of the Spanish conversion that I can play. I won't chatting, but you can hear her flip, which I think is quite interesting.

Ari  

Thank you for calling Bionic Auto Parts. This is Ari, how can I help you today?

Speaker 1  

Parts, parts. 

Georgia Carver

Wrong one! Let me do this. I had a 5050, chance of getting that right.

Chris Daglis 

So you took a gamble. Here we go. You stuffed it up. 

Ari  

Thank you for calling Bionic Auto Parts. This is Ari. How can I help you today?

Ari  

Perfecto. Puedo you Darlene, Espanol

Speaker 1 

in que puedo a sister Leo Andrea. Give entiendo

Ari  

que esta buscando un transfer case para un Jeep Grand Cherokee, Laredo, cuatro, cuatro de los mil quince.

Georgia Carver  

They go. I got it right the second time. Yeah, but that's Ari, obviously, and that's, that's a real, genuine call that bionic took, and that was her answer, and coming back to him in Spanish. And obviously, as you said, that in their dashboard, it came back converted into English, what they were looking for.

Chris Daglis

Yeah. So there's, there's a heap of stuff happening that we have. We've had a number of calls come through asking for other languages as well. We had a few calls asking for Arabic. So that's all being enabled. As we speak, we've got a new version 07 coming out next week that will dynamically be able to know that the time that the caller has called in at is during working hours, so it will answer that call differently to the ones after hours. So the after hours calls maybe we'll come back to you tomorrow morning. The during hours calls may be taken and say we'll be back to in a couple of minutes, for example, or we'll call you back soon, because Ari knows that it's during my working hours. So that's all going to happen dynamically. Rather than have separate models, we've got some color coding happening so that potentially engines are one particular color transmissions and different color collision parts are another color on the dashboard. Yeah. So there's a heap of stuff coming through. There's some great analytics there that are there. So again, me. Moving away from Ari for a second. Of course, if anyone's interested, let us know, but moving away from Ari for a second, if you think about what's possible, something that's going to happen to this industry at some point in time. AI is here today, and those that are early adopters, I think, are going to really take advantage of it. One of the really interesting points that Pat from Pam's made on the panel was you need to do it properly. And I absolutely agree with him. You don't want a situation where I don't know R is that? What kind of trees that planted today when they're asking for an engine, right? So it really has to be specific about and that's where the beauty of what we're building is. We're not building something that could work with accountants and another one could work with lawyers, another one real estate agents. What we're focused on is the automotive recycling industry, and Ari knows a whole heap of information, some interchange information, part numbering Vin information that she actually that the demonstration I did in the set, in the session that we did, we asked, actually, Amber asked the audience, what card Do you want to look for? And I actually called our input on the speaker, and someone said they wanted Silverado 1500 I think it was 2015 model engine. So that's what I asked her for. And she came back and said, Is it a 5.3 now they've got 5.3 engines, so it really makes it real. And the customer said, yes, it's a 5.3 so you know, it's, it's interesting, as there's a lot happening there. I think everyone should be aware of AI. Should be researching, understanding more about it.

Georgia Carver  

Well, what other I mean, Pat touched on a few things, but in the session, Chris, what else came out? What? What do you think? What else? How else do you think I AI is going to come into the industry? What other you know? I know we've kind of looked at what people could be using now,

Chris Daglis

inventory, but inventory, quality grading, yeah, all that stuff's going to be there. I mean, you know, I know ARA and you are G have now signed that deal around, you know, building a quality grading scheme, certification program, whatever you call it, yeah. Yeah. So we look at that. You know, one of our challenges is, when we're working with collision repairs, explaining how much damage is on a particular part, right? It's they're really used parts. Is it a scratch? Is the parking dent? How long is it going to take to repair all that type of stuff? So collision repairs and insurance companies are already using AI to, you know, determine high level what the approximate cost of a repair is going to be on a particular make modeling year of vehicle based on the images of the accident. Because of when I see, you know, 100 of these vehicles damaged in this area to this level of severity. I know that the accident damage is between $4,500, therefore I can make a quick decision as an insurer as to if it's a total loss or not. Yeah, so it's already there. Now this application is slightly different, but because it's looking at small repairs, that is looking at a door and saying it's got half hour repair. So I think there's, there's a lot of opportunity. We're working on a bit of that at the minute with with an AI company looking at, you know, the imaging piece. So I think that one's going to be a really, really big one. Now that, you know, this agreement's been signed between ARA and URG, now's the time to look at it and question whether we've been doing grading the right way, whether we can use technology to do it better?

Georgia Carver  

Yeah, for sure. And then I get if someone wants to find out more about Ari or pick your brain on AI and what you sort of have learned along the way, just send you an email. If they want to speak to us in Australia, send Kirk an email us.

Chris Daglis  

Chris@autopartneredsolutions.com  or Kirk@autopartneredsolutions.com  or Georgia@autopartneredsolutions.com. Feel free to contact us. Happy to sort of throw ideas around.

Georgia Carver  

There's a demo on the website if people want to go on to www.autopartneredsolutions.com they can very quickly jump on the AI landing page. And if you scroll down, about halfway down, you can enter in your details into a form, and you can have a phone conversation with Ari and put it through the ringer and see what you can, what you can. I think that's an Australian saying, isn't it?

Chris Daglis  

I think it is actually, we just, we just bamboozled the Americans.

Georgia Carver  

Yeah, give her a good test and see what you think. And obviously get in touch and we can, we can give you further details. Or I know absolutely, I know quite a few people have been reaching out to junior and Amber as well and asking them what their experience is. 

Chris Daglis

There's lots more now too, right? So if you want, if you want to talk to others in the market, let us know, and we can put you on to a heap of other people that are now using the AI to take their overflow and after hours calls. So if you need to talk to people, there's plenty out there now, so let us know, and we'll certainly put you want to

Georgia Carver  

Awesome. Well, I will hopefully get this out for everyone as soon as possible, and we'll,

Chris Daglis  

I think the key, if I can finish off with this, yeah, keep an open mind when it comes to what's out there and what's available. Do your research and start thinking about how it can be applied, because there is just so much out there, so looking forward to it, I think exciting times. All

Georgia Carver  

Right, thank you. Bye, thanks everyone. Bye.