The Impact of AI in Automotive Recycling with Mike Kunkel.

In this episode, Chris, Georgia, and Mike Kunkel dive into a candid discussion about the rise of AI in the auto recycling industry. They chat about how Ari, APS’s AI Sales Agent, is being used in the real world—and what that means for auto recycling business owners.

They also talk about the elephant in the room: “We’ve created this issue—this challenge of leads. Now we need to do something with them. Customers are expecting a response.” It’s a powerful reminder that adopting AI is just the start. Without the right processes and mindset, opportunities can still slip through the cracks.

If you’re curious about how AI is reshaping sales, improving service, and creating new expectations for recyclers—this one’s for you.

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Transcript

Chris

Welcome to The Automotive Recyclers Experience Podcast today. Georgia. How you going?

Georgia   

Hello I'm good.

Chris 

Hello and Mike, how are you?

Mike 

I'm doing great. Thank you very much for having me. Looking forward to today.

Chris 

Excellent. So, Mike, what we wanted to do is just throw a few ideas around and, you know, talk a little bit about the digital assistant world. Obviously, you know that we've created that digital assistant in Ari or whatever you wanna call it. And we've been deploying it. We've presented at a number of your profit team meetings over the last month or so.

We've got a number of your customers or the members of your profit team peer groups that have signed up and using the system and generally speaking it's done a great job, but we thought we'd get you on, see what feedback is coming through and let's just open the discussion up because I know a lot of people are asking questions. It was the talk of the URG Conference.

I've got people messaging me on Facebook, on the Forum and other platforms. So let's talk a little bit about what you're seeing, Mike and what the opportunities and challenges are.

Talk about the elephant in the room too.

Mike 

Wow. Look, it's it's. It's really an interesting and dynamic time, Chris. And for everybody who knows me, knows that I'm an equal opportunity insulter, right? I mean, sooner or later, I insult everybody and every product in the industry for pointing out because with all good there's bad and realistically coming back in you start to look at the application of the product and at the end of the day the truth of the matter is:

we're being third party feed to death on a lot of things, and when you start looking at the overall cost structure.

You look at what's happening to the price of cars has been pretty stable, but the price of parts has not been stable. It's been coming down. That's a fancy way of talking about margin compression. So when you start coming in and couple that with the fact that we're coming out of a high watermark followed by a softer period of time, there's a lag period where. The sales staff is waiting for the good old days to come back rather than rolling up your sleeves and coming back in.

That's a very fancy way of dancing around, saying the overall aggression level needs to be tidied up on the sale of used auto parts in order to get us through a period of time where it's more challenging. At the same time, the overall workforce isn't quite what it needs to be. I don't have a big stack of resumes on my desk of people wanting to come to work for me and you know and and whatnot. So when you start looking and coming back up and in the world that we live in.

You knew it was just a matter of time before some type of artificial intelligence, some type of a digital assistant was coming. So what you've created in airy is kind of the natural evolution of coming back in. And when you look at it objectively, at a bare minimum, it checks all the boxes it gets the customer's name, it gets their phone number, it finds out where they're calling from, it gets the basic information about the car, it asks if you qualifying questions to the customer and basically gets all the information to tee up somebody to do some follow up. 

If the truth be told, all of us have been in a situation in our lifetimes where we would have settled for a warm body that we could plug into just at least answer the phone, right. One of the numbers that we don't really talk about a lot, but what area is really bringing to the front, is your dropped percentage of phone calls. How many times are the customer calling you and hanging up before they actually talk to you or go to a person or get an answer? And look, I get all the stories, all they'll call back though. And you know what? Sometimes they do, but sometimes they don't. Right. And and and look, we gamble enough as this is. I want more sure bets of coming back in and I'd much rather be on the hunt, than the fishing component of just waiting for it to happen. So you have some things to start coming in. You also start to look at this and say that we're not far off in a world where so much of what we're doing is being digitally processed, that this is a learning step in the curve to moving to a fully animated automated. ordering system process that revolves around an airy taking the phone call, accessing the computer system using some of the.

Potential algorithms on pricing, all these are all just rules that you set up to come back in and a lot of those things ultimately just force us into how we are going to teach somebody how to be a salesperson except doing it in an AI fashion to get the consistency and coming back. 

Right. So I think that really is the backdrop of what it is that we're doing, so from a technological standpoint, it checks all the boxes it's spot on. Of the ID and concept, but the truth of the matter is, that doesn't necessarily implement the way that it is, because a lot of what we talked about was futuristic. 

What's not futuristic is capturing the information, but you can come back and you can do it as I was kind of doing some homework for this and and looking at it, getting some examples put together and and coming back in because you said, what's your feeling on it? Well, it's brand new, right?

Shiny objects coming out of the toolbox are really cool. There's some people that are early adopters out there. There are some people who may have very high call drop rates that are just desperate for someone to answer the phone and come in. There's a mirage of reasons for why I would need this as an add on to my business where it could really help me. But when you start, OK.

Chris 

Let me jump in there real quick.

So there's an example where a customer had two of their sales, two of the four away on a day and they were stuck. They said we need to switch Ari on during the day because we need to pick up those calls. And you know the digital assistant did an amazing job, prepping all of the quotes there. The challenge, Mike, is what do I do now? I need to call these people back. And I've still got phones ringing, right?

So let's be clear. There's an elephant in the room and that is, we created this issue, or this challenge of leads. Now I need to do something with those leads. I don't want to give a bad customer experience. A customer's expecting something from me. Now. 

Yes, we're working on different things within the system to help a salesperson actually respond and prioritise those leads. But yes, we've created something that hasn't existed in the industry to date because we don't know how big the problem is. We don't know how many calls we're missing over a weekend and how many of them are worthwhile calls? So there are things that you can do with the agent, with the, with the technology that will actually help. But at the same time in creating this opportunity, we're also creating a bit of a challenge.

Mike

But when you stop and think about it, if I have dropped calls and you're talking about using it for overflow calls, well, my sales people are telling me they're too busy. That's why I have the missed calls to start with. So I get the information that doesn't exactly feed them up to make the call back to find out the whole thing. So I mean, I got to be treating problems, not just symptoms of the problems and coming back. If I take 500 phone calls, for example, call it over a weekend. I get 500 phone calls. That's probably not out of the realm of possibility for a lot of folks.

To come back, depending on your population and your game, well: what's a salesperson field in a day? 100 phone calls? So if Ari takes 500 calls and you qualify that out, even down to 100 leads. That's one salesperson. One full day of normal activity that you start coming back in. So you do have to have some things in order to capitalise on doing this, otherwise what you start to run into and not that this doesn't work and not that I can't make a case for this to make sense, but I could be of the the type that I just may want to apply this for strictly engines and transmissions.

Georgia 

But it's also any opportunity if you're wanting to put in tools to help you grow, you have to make that investment. You have to make the investment in the software, but you also have to make the investment in the infrastructure to support that growth. It's all good and well to say I'm going to grow and we're going to have now 10 phone lines to answer or, we're going to buy 10 cars a day instead of three cars a day. If you don't have the dismantlers to dismantle the car or if you don't have the people to answer the phones or make the calls back. You're going to have the same problem.

So it's the same problem, just put across different places.

Mike 

Georgia it in my world, I use the term by, but it's an all-encompassing term that means by car inventory, car dismantled, car.

It has better become a little bit more of a challenge lately as things tighten up, right? But yes, it is that is it all kind of comes together about what it is that you're doing and what it is that you're trying to accomplish and making sure that you go cause look, you can have the best tool in the world, but if you don't put it, apply it correctly, it's not going to give you the result. It's hard to get the pay back.

Georgia

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Mike 

Also, if you don't ever take the tool out of the toolbox, it's never going to pay any dividends. What's that mean? Well, if I get 500 phone calls, and on Thursday morning around 11:00 I start calling them back. Well, that was an epic fail. The messages are three and four days old at that point in time, so you start to need to make sure that you know how to really do this and do this correctly, you have to have a way to measure it, right? There's a lot of things that you have built into your dashboards as far as moving the calls around that allow a certain amount of trackability already put in there. So statistically.

You can look and see because I mean, look, I'm not opposed to spending money.

I am opposed to spending money on wild fishing trips that don't ever produce any fish that come out of it, right? But if we're spending money, we're getting a return on the money. It absolutely makes sense. So when you go into something like this, we need to make sure we have a way to measure what the return really actually is. And that way it's not. Well, I feel like it does good or I or you know, what I come back in there because you can stop and look:

There was an example. I looked at that had 123 phone calls that Ari processed that led to 20 sales on the surface. That doesn't sound very good, but when you couple it back and say that the sales equated to $18,000 worth of revenue, right, a $900 average part sale, and these are strictly over weekend things. Now it starts to sound pretty interesting.

In what it is that it does so then you start to look at what are the, what are the pieces of the puzzle that you don't know.

I mean, they did really well on drivetrain units, that much is obvious by the average ticket at $900. That tells you there weren't a lot of tail lights and alternators that were sold. Does that mean they didn't get any requests for tail lights and alternators or they chose to not respond to any requests on tail lights and alternators coming back in? How is it being applied?

Chris 

Yeah.

Mike

And when you start coming back in, you know, we always talk about high volume order processors as our sales people. Then we do everything we possibly can to force them into being higher volume order processors by what we push on them.

Chris

Yeah. So let's, let's just expand on that a little bit. So what is the cost of those $18,000 worth of sales, what are we cost them for the month?

Mike 

I'll let call it $1100 standing on my tippy toes by a little bit.

Chris 

OK, so $1100 for an $18,000 return. So that's an 18X return on their money or 17X?

Chris 

Not too bad.

Obviously the number of calls they converted was low. They cherry pick the high value ones. Makes sense. It's like when we say, Mike, what's your minimum value, right? What's your minimum, you know, is it $150.00 these days? I don't know. Depends on the business, right? So we artificially do what we need to do.

To prioritise our time to get the best value out of that we do that in a number of parts of our business. You know what value of a vehicle we buy because of our cost of operation, cost of process, etcetera? So there's a number of things there that we already do and we're used to doing in the industry. But yeah, what we do have is a whole heap of alternatives and starter motors and air conditioning compressors and steering racks that potentially, we're not getting to, but one of the things that excites me about what we're doing here is that the opportunity that we have exposed and that's really what it is, exposing that opportunity that you know, at a minimum for after hours calls, we are not accessing right is giving. In your example an 18X return on the money spent, right. As just pure dollars. That's wonderful now.

What are we doing to help with some of the other stuff? So we're building some things.  My challenge, our challenge APS has challenged at the minute, is we're getting such an amount of feedback coming in, which is amazing feedback that it's, you know, we need to prioritise the work that we're doing on the development so that we can actually push some of these through. 

But some of the things are for example: to be able to integrate with a Powerlink, for example, because it's open and interrogates your inventory, right? That's obviously a key piece. And I'd say in the next two months you will see some significant advancements in that inventory interrogation.

Mike

Mm hmm.

Chris

Feeding into that inventory and Powerlink, and potentially via the T4 report on Pinnacle, but that's a bit more manual as you know. So that's the first thing. The second thing is how do we respond to some of those lower value parts without just throwing them out? How do we respond to those quickly and accurately? So we're building for example into it an ability to say, OK, you we know you've got three of these alternators. There are only $100 each and you've got 300 calls to follow up on, of which fifty are engines and gearboxes. We want to focus on those 50. So for these lower value items, how about we say yes available, tick box value, we've already got the value $100, send text back. How can we for example say if the customer said I would like a call back? Fill that just yes, available $100. Ari calls Mike back and says Hi, Mike, this is Ari from Mike's auto parts.

You called about the alternator for the Chevy. Whatever it is, Silverado 1500 and yes we can help you with that. It's $100 and it comes with the 24 month parts and labour. Alrighty and take the order. Send the payment link, receive payment, process the order. Right. So there's a number of things there that we're working on to make that part of the process more efficient so that we're not wasting those calls 

But, I think there's going to be a transition period where we as a business, we as an industry, realise that now what we've done is we've exposed more fruit on the tree, OK? It's like, you know you. You spoke before about the cost of salvages, not necessarily going down. If anything, it might start going up again pretty quickly.

Cost of parts? Well, there's competition out there, so we need to harvest more parts. So if I expose more fruit on that fruit tree.

Mike 

Yep.

Chris

It's not a matter of, I don't have any fruit. It's a matter of how can I pick the fruit? How can I harvest more of this tree so that I can get a better return on the investment I'm making? So what we're doing is we're exposing more fruit on the tree. Now what we do next and how we can help our customers in the recycler pick that fruit and not let it rot is the critical piece because that's where we get a better return on our salvage.

We are now harvesting an extra hundred $150.00 of a vehicle and probably no one better to ask what a couple $100 off each vehicle extra per vehicle is gonna do to your bottom line on a yearly basis, right?

Mike

Well, look, these are all huge things and a lot of what you're talking about, Chris, is the behavioural changes as the way we sell parts has been dramatically changing over the last couple of years as we move more to an electronically, visual inventory, you know a much more informed customer about what we have and and much more of the OE part number environment driven.

You know, if you really read the tea leaves, you're all talking about how there are big chunks of this that get things electronically aligned to make the simplification of the communication come through. So an awful lot of what you're talking about. And I think what's probably happening to you is as this product comes to market, everybody has ideas on how they can apply it. To their business and what you need to do to make that happen. 

One of the things that we really focused on after you left in the presentations at the peer groups was kind of really kind of understanding that, you know, look, I'm really not into commercial endorsement of products. It's really not my cup of tea. Everybody knows that.I mean endorsements like a manhole cover to me, it's treated like a Frisbee, right. I just don't toss them around and come back. Right. So we talk about things.

Chris

As long as it's not a boomerang. If it's a boomerang, you're in big trouble.

Mike 

That's correct. No boomerangs. We don’t need to break bones, but you know when you come in, there's big chunks of this that are about taking the blinders of whether I embrace it or whether I don't embrace it, whether I compete against it, whether I embrace it, and my competition embraces it, those all become things of how does this shape up of how I go to market moving forward to maintain or create any competitive advantage that I have.

When you look at the peer group, alost every single person that we talk to is being mandated by the numbers that they need to sell. Two more parts per car than what they're currently selling. Everything that you talked about is ways to come back in. And what is that part? What's not a $25 part? It's a part at the standard part price average. And when we start talking about alternators and tail lights, everybody starts thinking about $25 parts and those aren't $25 parts anymore.

More, it's still big money tickets and still working back on getting this out of the old mentality of what it is that we're doing and how we go about doing it and then being able to apply that goal. Because when this really comes in, you're really talking about how this factors into entry level positions within the company. Do I assign certain dollar transactions to an entry level, you know hourly, I mean everybody that knows me knows I'm strong base pay model person, but do you come in with an hourly position that becomes the training thing where you start coming in learning how to look up the parts, learning how to process this follow up on the text message that comes that comes back up. Start working into learning it. Then I use this to tee up the bigger ticket items to my more experienced sales people and come back to some of the six figure mega producers that are saying who are just tapped out and I've just maxed out, right. Can you get this to where they can process another two or three orders a day because it's quick and easy that they can incorporate that into their mojo. Can I start to work this up and come back in and use this as a relationship enhancer as we move from more of a salesperson driven model?

To a customer service representative model where it's about the relationship.

Chris 

Mm hmm.

Mike

With the person that comes into play with that. So I think there's an awful lot of tenants that have this kind of twist and curves that it comes in. So I would imagine everybody's got an add on piece and that is the challenge for you is to prioritise and come back up, especially when you're in an industry where we're used to the yard management systems giving us a ticket number that we never see any action on ever.

Chris

No, I'm happy to say that in that context we are and without saying anything about anyone else.

We are very, very responsive and it's and it's great when a customer says to us on Friday, Chris, it'd be good to be able to see that, that and that. And here are five things that we need and by Saturday morning, they've got it. It's like, wow.

Georgia

I've got an e-mail in front of me that's going out this week about some of the changes that are going to be rolling out across universally to all of our customers. And  just even one of the things that I just like is that originally she only spoke English, then she spoke Spanish. Now she speaks Spanish, French and Italian and English. And this is all, I mean, this is all we're really just a matter of weeks since we've launched, and we're already making significant updates.

And Chris, you've said this a few times but this is the very worst it will ever be. It's never going to be worse than this. It's only going to get better and that feedback and that input from our customers who are using it every day and they're all using it slightly differently and they've got, you know, superficial things like a different name, they want a different accent, they want a male, they want a female, they want different things on how they process those orders and what they do with the calls and what the dashboard looks like: colour coded and all those things.

This is the worst it's going to be so that feedback that we're getting, that's gonna help us actually continue to evolve her, and we've got a responsive team. We've got people who are ready to make those changes. And I guess it’s no different to what our customers are doing with their parts, their triaging and saying, OK, what are the most critical things we have to do, what are the most critical calls we've got to make. We're looking at that feedback and what are the most critical bits of feedback that we've got to put in the next stage update, what can we park until the following update and go for what we can do overnight and have a response tomorrow because it's initially 3 clicks of a button and we can do it.

Chris 

Yeah, and that's really important from our perspective to be able to give that really quick response. Within reason.  I'd wanna give quick responses on everything, but we need to programme things. We need to have a plan so we know we've set up an agile approach where we have a two week sprint, we've set the two week Sprint as of yesterday. So we know exactly what's happening over the next two weeks and we leave enough room for little tweaks along the way. But I would suggest that we're going to be seeing updates every two weeks. Every Monday, an e-mail will be going out letting people know here's what's changed over that I might just send it.

Georgia

So I better put that in my diary too, huh?

Chris

Yeah! You opened a can of worms here. Let's talk about the marketing side of it. So I think one of the things and I will mention their name now because I saw it on Instagram. It's not as if it's a secret, but Bionic has actually created their own promotion and logo, basically saying meet our new salesperson, our digital assistant Ari. And I thought that was amazing, right? So they're using that as an advertising tool, if you like, so that they don't miss those after hours or weekend calls, you can speak to Ari, leave the information you need and we'll get back to you. All right. So that's really interesting. 

The second bit to the marketing piece that I want to talk about is, you know, 1 of the things and it's a double edged sword sword for us, right. So we're going to throw Georgia under the bus here a little bit, but…

Georgia

Hi.

Chris 

The double edged sword is we spent money on marketing to get leads. Here we have a tool. That's taking the money you've already put into marketing right over the years.

To then capture the lead and present it to you, you've already spent the money on marketing on that. No, I'm not saying don't spend more money on marketing. All I'm saying is you've got to make the most of the leads you already have coming in from the marketing. You have already gone and spent money on.

Mike

But Chris, I don't necessarily know that I agree with what you just said. The fact that I've spent the biggest chunk of my marketing dollars telling people that I'm closed on weekends and not to call me. So the fact that they're still calling me on the weekend and no one is answering is telling me that my marketing dollars didn't work because they're still calling. So from that standpoint, I kind of challenge to say that maybe this is picking up on people who I'm missing the mark on with how I'm marketing or how I'm advertising.

Or how I'm targeting that to come back in because they obviously aren't getting the message that I'm closed on weekends to start with.

Chris

It's either that, Mikel\, we're not getting the message that some people can't call during the week. It's probably a bit of both, right. So what, where do we need to be?

Georgia 

We've gotta meet our cost. We've gotta meet our customers where they are as well. And if we can give that. But if we can give them a solution like we do, if we turn the we've got a we always talk from a marketing point of view about what's our customers pain point. We don't need to just go in and ram what we're doing down our customers because that doesn't resonate with them. They've got a genuine problem and we need to tell them that we can help them solve their problem. If they're calling on the weekend and you know that we're not open on the weekends but we can give them a short term solution which tells us everything you need. We've got you, and then it's like a little safety, like, hey, we've got you. We'll nurture you through this. And on Monday, you're going to hear from someone who's going to call you back with the part. Now you can go and enjoy your weekend. And you know what we've got you. We'll see you on the weekend. And that's building that relationship. Next time, they may call during the week because they go. Gosh, they were nice, but they called me on Monday morning. And I know that they're available on Monday and the next time they call back because they go, you know what? You guys were so great last time I had a really good experience and a really positive experience.

Mike

Mm hmm.

Yeah.

Mike

Mm hmm. Look, look, I would agree with all that, George. I think if you look at it in all seriousness, right, you know I was a Saturday killer back in my salesman days, right? Because they bought it on Saturday. They returned it on Monday. It was a nightmare. I have all those stories that we hear at all the conventions about why we closed on Saturday. The truth of the matter is I wrote 3 invoices a Saturday 'cause I sold one or two engines or transmission combos and a high dollar headlight that I really wanted to sell the rest of the stuff I just nonchalantly blew it off. What you're doing is bringing in the opportunity to still do that exact same thing which we lost when we closed on Saturdays to start with and come in so that in a worst case scenario you kind of have that as an opportunity and an option.

The ability to educate because you know one of the things is Ari does what I tell her to do.

In there, and if that's, give them a detailed message about what our operating hours are, she'll give a detailed message about what the operating hours, until they either get to the end of the message or they get tired of listening to it and hang up, right. If they hang up too much, that's a me problem. I can understand that my message is too long by just understanding, well, how long I get them before they hang up. There's all kind of ways to skin this cat. Right. So.

Georgia

They have that data, we talked before about A customer who had X amount of calls. What was that? I think did you say it was 18% to me this morning or third what was the drop off rate?

Mike

OK.

Chris 

Abandoned 16%.

Georgia 

We found 16%. I mean, if only 16% of those phone calls, I think it was the 500 calls, right? So 500 phone calls over the weekend and only 16% of them are dropping off. That's a pretty good number. If you think about that, you know all those calls.

Chris

And that's right. On the average, it's right on the average across all our customers, so.

Georgia

Yeah, ordinarily, yeah. And I do it on websites. with social media and marketing. When people come to us and say, hey, I want to do Facebook, everyone's told me I have to do Facebook or everyone's told me I have to do e-mail marketing or text mess marketing or whatever it is that's currently trending. And then we go and look at their website and their website's not, you know, it was done 15 years ago. It's not mobile optimised. There's no way to generate leads.

Georgia 

The site's terrible, it doesn't read well and there's nowhere to do anything on the site. They just land, we call that the lemming effect, right? The little lemmings run around and then they get to your website and you pay all this money to get the leads to your website, and then they drop off because there's nothing to do. It's the same with phone calls. If you're marketing and you're saying call us, call us, call us where the, we're the ones. We're the best ones and they call and no one answers. You're losing those lemmings. And that's what's happening on the weekends. So we're giving them a way to generate leads, whether it's on a website, whether.

Chris 

They just drop off.

Georgia 

Now it's up to the recycler to identify how they're going to manage those leads. How and what are they going to do with this problem with all these leads? They've created the problem. They've created the problem. What are you going to do now, guys? How are we going to solve it? You're going to make some money.

Chris 

But here’s something that a couple of our customers are actually gonna start putting in place as of this week. Because they're getting so many calls on a Saturday and Sunday, Saturday's a big day.

They're looking at asking one of their team to be on standby, so I want you to check the control centre at 11:00 AM and every two hours. Ultimately, if you've got someone in your sales team that's eager and wants to earn more, commission and is prepared to be there on a Saturday, they don't have to be there all the time because what we can do is we can just get the e-mail to go to Mike, who's on call on Saturday. So Mike looks at his emails coming through.

Georgia

You don't even have to be in the office. They can be at home. They can be at the kids sport, they can be at the playground with the kids if they want to.

Mike 

Look right, right now, these big gun sales people that have given their cell phone numbers out to everybody or selling parts after hours and on weekends to their select few making up the numbers, figuring it out, using an online portal themselves. You know, in order to do it. So there's all kinds of ways to make this happen as you start to get into it, right.

It's not the end all, be all. You just don't turn it loose and expect my sales are going to dramatically go up. You can do all this and and have it, it will just cost you money and not work at all if you don't put forth a good plan and and and the good effort to come in with a good plan and a good effort, it seems like it would be awfully hard.

Chris 

Mm hmm. Absolutely.

Mike

To not get a decent return off of doing what it was doing, and in certain instances I mean I've said this if if I have 24 to 48 hours and I have to get someone to answer my phone because I have two of my four sales people that are off or you know, whatever. I'm in a  serious amount of trouble. I can't come up with people that fast. I can at least do something like this that will hit the basic boxes and come back in and allow me to be kind of scampering through with some form of a plan of how I get kind of caught up, but if I just do this thinking that it's the, you know, it's the greatest thing ever, I'm probably in for some disappointment and a shorter subscription.

Georgia 

It's a tool.

Chris 

Yeah.

Georgia 

It's a tool, just like everything else we have, whether it's answering your phones, your website, whether it's a claw thing to cut open a car, whatever it is, it's a tool, you know, that's the technical term claw thing to open a car, whatever, whatever it is.

Chris

Yes, we know that one.

Mike

Mm hmm.

Georgia  

A salesperson is ultimately a tool, but they're a person. They're a person to a means to an end. This is another means to an end. To help bring your business and make you more money. How you use it and how you execute it is up to you. Just like everything else, you can have a claw thingy to open the car, and you can use it terribly. Or you can use it really well. And you can pull out that part undamaged unscathed and charge a premium price, it's the same.

Chris 

Look,  I think the moral of the story and what I'm getting out of this little podcast that we're just having a chat here, which is great, is that there are, there are opportunities and challenges all over the place, whether it's AI, whether it's Ari, whether it's a digital assistant. I think the message here is that we need to open our eyes to what the opportunities are out there as an industry.

We need to be aware of the changes that are happening and the fact that you know what, there is stuff that other industries may be doing that we're not yet doing and we need to embrace the fact that some technologies are leaping ahead at such speed that if we don't.

Open our eyes to them. We're gonna fall behind. OK, now it's not. It's not. I'm not talking about Ari now or our digital assistant. I'm talking about. Just generally, OK.

And the reality is that we're gonna need to think differently. We're gonna need to look at things differently. We can't. We know the definition of insane is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different outcome. It ain't gonna happen. So we need to think differently. We need to act differently. And we need to sort of start having these discussions. Mike and this is why I wanted to have this session because it's about getting our people, our industry, our friends, our customers, thinking that way.

Mike

Mm hmm mm hmm.

Chris

And we need to do more and more of that.

Mike 

Well, look, some of this I have to have to start to have some honest thoughts and discussions about who my customer is, right? If my customer is a bunch of folks that are my age, right, I'm 60 years old. I'm really not all that hip and talking to Ari. Give me a full heartbeat person in the deal. That's what I'm used to. The younger you get, the more they don't want to deal with the 60 year old cantankerous old goat that's gonna know everything and.

Happy because they didn't have the VIN number and they said it was a 27 whenever it was only a 26. But I mean, when you start coming in there, you have to understand your. If my customer's gonna be put off by it, it's not gonna work. If my customer, as it becomes more millennial and it transitions and it starts to work its way in. What segment of my customer is it for which sales people are going to not work well with this. A salesperson can make Ari look really really bad by not converting.

Georgia  

I don't believe it.

Mike 

Any of the sales or coming back in a salesperson can make Ari look outstanding by working really, really hard and and digging down in there, you have the potential that a salesperson may want to do nothing but Ari calls in other instances, they don't even want to touch Ari with a 10 foot pole because she's the devil. Up there in the death of me and separating my customer and no matter what you do, it is about looking to the future and how this is going to spider web its way through the entire industry.

And I have said, my 4 year old granddaughter, by the time she's 18 years old, if some a real person answers the phone, she's going to be absolutely stunned and flabbergasted, isn't it? She'll be more apt to hang up because she doesn't know what to do. She's more used to dealing with the computer and the and the whole thing. That's the reality of it. And so whether you want to accept that how you want to accept that, how do you want to move forward?

Chris 

Yeah.

Mike 

Has a big impact on what really is going on and and like I said, whether I embrace it or not, whether someone else in my market embraces it or not, I'm going to have to deal with it in some way, shape or form. There are things within the industry that make me think that there are some folks that are pretty far along on some things that they have going and to your point that you said.

Chris

Hmm.

Mike 

This is a fast changing pace that we have as auto recyclers who are all 10 to 15 years behind on technology aren't going to be that far behind on this because some of the things with the cost with the development of it, the way that it can be slightly modified and it will work for multiple industries is going to come back up that these are all things that we're going to be really forced to be looking at and and how we're going to work it and how we're really going to use it to expand.

Chris 

Yeah.

Mike

You know 'cause at the end of the day, I'm only here for one reason and one reason and one reason only, and that's to make money. And that's what this boils down to: how do we make money for doing it? And this just becomes the next tool in the toolbox that allows me to cover more opportunities to pick up some of those missing. You know, the fumbles, per SE. The parts that the customer needs it, the customer's willing to pay the money, but somehow or another, we find a way to not execute on the sale. Does this help minimise some of those circumstances?

Chris 

Yeah.

Mike 

And allow me to convert more of those into invoices.

Chris 

Yep, alright, I think we've gone probably for about an hour and it's been we actually enjoy doing this because we get to talk, but we do need to let the listeners sort of go at some point in time. So,  look I'd like to expand on some of these discussions. It's not just about the Ari digital system. I think it's about thinking differently, Mike. So Georgia and Mike if if that's something that you guys are interested in doing, I think we should probably.

You know, throw some ideas out there and start thinking differently and talking differently. Maybe have even a different people come on.

Instead of doing stuff out there, because I really feel that our industry needs to go the next step with some of this, we need to extract a little bit more and harvest more of each vehicle. And this is just one way of doing that by presenting the leads. There's other ways, right? So.

Let's let's call it a day.

Georgia 

Sure, sure.

Chris 

Mike, we'll send you the recording so you can send it to your list of contacts. We'll obviously send it to our list of contacts through our CRM and we'll put it online and let's keep on having this discussion.

Mike

Yes, that was fun. And like I said, this is a lot of things to where the the you know, like I said, the goal is to really get the blinders ripped off of everybody to really get them thinking about how we can really create some efficiencies and really up our game to, to, to ultimately sell more parts.

Chris 

Excellent, Mike, thank you, Georgia, always a pleasure.

Georgia Carver   

Pleasure. Bye.

Mike

Alright, thanks guys.

Chris

Bye.