"An Army of Experts!" – The End of Software as We Know It + Reacting to Live Dealer Comments | Pre-NADA AI #7 Eric Rea, CEO of Podium
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"An Army of Experts!" – The End of Software as We Know It + Reacting to Live Dealer Comments | Pre-NADA AI #7 Eric Rea, CEO of Podium
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Car
Ford F150S
The Ford F-150 is a big truck that many people use for work and everyday tasks. It's known for being tough and reliable, and you can choose different versions depending on what you need it for.
Term
telematics
Telematics is a technology that helps cars communicate information about their condition and location. It can tell service centers when a car needs repairs or maintenance.
LIVE
The thing for dealers is you should plan on agents, just like agents are helping our engineers write code.
You should plan on an army of experts that are helping you run your dealership in the future,
not just like a BDC agent, not just a service, you know, service advisor agent.
You should plan on having an army of experts, because that's how we feel right now in engineering and product podium.
In part seven and our final installment of the pre-NADAAI spotlight series, I'm joined by Eric Rea, CEO of Podium.
In his words, software isn't cool, solving business problems is.
Eric breaks down why AI is moving from experimental software to true labor replacement,
how an army of AI agents can run dealership workflows end-to-end, and why service departments may be the biggest winner.
A big thank you to our sponsors for making this episode possible,
CNA National, Icon Technologies, and of course Podium.
And now let's get into the show.
Eric Rea on the CDG Podcast. Eric, welcome back.
Hey, thanks for having me, Yossi.
Great to have you back on. Eric, I'm going to jump right back into our conversation,
which was so good that I wanted to start recording, and here we are.
So we were basically talking about just the pace of change right now that's happening technologically in our industry and in just general tech.
You're obviously running a tech company.
I stay very close to the vest because it impacts this industry so greatly and other things I'm just generally interested in it.
Fun fact, we set up, or I could say a community member within Circles, our dealer peer group,
set up a impromptu event that was just AI and vibe coding live session.
This was like a Zoom call, right? This person in our community was just like,
hey, I want to set this up. I think that we can have a good conversation.
And dude, there was just tons of sign ups. I don't have the exact number here,
but a lot of dealers signed up for this, which sort of surprised me initially.
I was like, wow, I said, these are dealers who are not necessarily in tech industry.
Obviously, they have a lot of technology in their dealerships,
but they're carving out an hour of their day today to attend this AI and vibe coding session within Circles,
which was led by a guy named Jason Mayhew. Shout out, Jason, for even doing this.
Anyways, I found that very interesting and I'm sharing this context as a way to lead in
to a broader conversation I wanted to have with you to kick this podcast off,
which is just like, what the hell is happening right now as the pace of technology and innovation is just mind boggling.
It's almost hard to keep up with. I want to start with that.
Tell me a little bit about what's your take on the current market environment.
Yeah, so we serve dealerships, but we are a software company and this is what's great.
This is what's great. That's happening right now.
We're waking up and we realize, well, we've known this for a long time.
No dealer even cares about software.
And so that's that's the main thing that we are understanding.
Like software has been a necessary evil for a long time.
I bet most dealers have too much of it in their dealership.
And what's happening for us in our industry is I think it's going to reflect an auto in the near future.
But like we have engineers now that do not write code.
So these people are making $450,000 a year in some cases.
And two years ago, every line of code was handwritten by an engineer.
Today, we have engineers, they work just as long, but they use agents and they do not write code themselves.
They just are orchestrating multiple agents to do the work for them.
And in some cases we can do that they can produce as 10 times as much product as they could two years ago.
So that's what we're seeing in our industry.
And the reason we brought this up is, okay, that's great because we can build more software and better software now.
That's great. But like, do we even need more software?
I don't know. We definitely need better software.
But I guess the thing for dealers is you should plan on agents just like agents are helping our engineers write code.
You should plan on an army of experts that are helping you run your dealership in the future,
not just like a BDC agent, not just a service, you know, service advisor agent.
You should plan on having an army of experts because that's how we feel right now in engineering and product at podium.
Wow. Okay. So you wrote a thread on X, you know, formerly Twitter.
This was like a couple of weeks ago. I read this thread. It was very interesting.
For anyone listening, you should follow Eric on X because he, you know, he was an interesting little post.
Anyways, you spoke about hitting what you mentioned, like $100 million ARR in AI, sorry, in AI, ARR.
It just, in other words, for anyone not familiar with the term, it's in revenue in your company being generated from AI products, again, simply put.
Anyway, so you said something very interesting in this post.
You wrote that when you were going through this entire process as a company, right,
you build software for dealers and other businesses, but dealers primarily,
you basically identified that, as you just mentioned, dealers didn't care about more software or nor did they need it.
The real constraint was people that they needed to solve the people problem. That was the pinch point.
Can you tell us a little bit about how, like, what was that process like for you going through and understanding,
okay, dealers have a staffing issue. That's what they need help with. And like, how you solved that or solved historically that?
Yeah. So we've been in, we've been around for 12 years. We've been a software company from day one.
My co-founder, I built the original product in two weeks and started selling it door to door.
And so you kind of just, like, for the past 20 years, software has been such a great business because it's so much better than pen and paper.
Cloud software is so much better than on-prem. Like, there's been, there have been these tailwinds because in the entire software industry,
for us included, where if you could build good software because it was difficult to build and you can get into the market and have good go to market,
you could be pretty successful. But the thing that's interesting is that software was only as good as the people behind it.
And if you had enough people, you, you just, basically the way to put, the way we think about it is all the software has been written up until two years ago,
relied on people to be valuable. What happens if you run a dealership and you're 3.5% net margin, you do not have the people to, to use the software.
So it's not that valuable. And so what we're seeing is the real thing people want, they don't want another freaking software to log into.
They want to augment labor to, to grow their business and run the operations of their dealer. That's it.
And so we need to stop thinking that we're so cool because we're a software company and we need to start focusing on labor replacement.
And it is not, again, they're not, nobody's firing anyone because if you look at a dealer, they don't have enough people to begin with.
So you're, there's just so much to do there. And we just got to stop thinking that software is cool. It's not helping people grow their business is cool.
Yeah, it's not a zero sum game. I agree with you. It's definitely positive sum. And to your point, I, I, I subscribe to this thesis that, you know, you, we just like everyone has been chronically understaffed in some capacity.
If that wasn't the case, then you could call any dealer right now and someone would pick up and you could get a service appointment.
That's just a simple way to put it. Okay, so since we last spoke, it was not a year ago, but just, you know, almost a year ago.
What has changed from, you know, what I should expect as a dealer and, you know, what AI can do for me today at the dealership?
Like what has changed in the last 60 days with respect to podium specifically?
Yeah, so for podium, I mean, we started with a single agent for BDC. We now have multiple agents. That's great. What I think you need to start to expect from us and anybody else that's delivering AI is
this, this idea that you have an army of experts that are there to help you run your, your dealership and not, not just like,
I've got an agent for this. I've got an agent for that and they don't talk to each other and they kind of just do this thing that's standalone.
The other thing I would say that's like here today, but I'm not seeing it in a lot of other AI products is an agent that can do a job from start to finish.
Like the one thing that's interesting, like, okay, like schedule a test drive, schedule a service appointment.
She, you know, give somebody an update on their vehicle. It's in the service drive.
So many of the AI, I mean, if I'm a dealer principle right now,
I'm probably so fed up with AI, the term, probably the products too, because most of them
don't actually help me solve any problems from start to finish.
It's like, yeah, I've got an agent and it responds in 30 seconds day or night, but like it only gets 10% of the way through the process of
scheduling the test drive or whatever it is. That's not that helpful. That's like a glorified answering service.
So we've tried to do this from the beginning and the technology has only made it more possible to do, but like
you should be expecting an agent today and an agent sucks too. It's a bad name. You should expect if you buy AI or buy labor replacement,
whatever you want to call it, you should expect that it does the job of a person.
And if it doesn't, you're wasting your money because you still have to have a person on the other side.
Basically, there was this time, yeah, sorry, go for it. I think we're just leaving this,
I think we're leaving the train of like experimental AI has left the station. That's gone.
And now I think the rubber meets the road, like, is this saving me money? Is this making me money?
If none of those, if those two things are not true, what am I paying for?
How from, from the business perspective, many dealers I speak with are being pitched multiple times a week by different providers.
How do you differentiate? Like, what do you, what are you, so you, let me, let me pretend I'm a fly on the wall right now in your boardroom
and you're sitting with, you know, your board, your executive team, whatever, and you're thinking about how do we future proof our business, right?
It's great. Things are going great right now. Martians are good, you know, business is good, but there's all these other funded companies
who are trying to, you know, come behind us and, you know, and take our market share, take our business.
What can you do to future proof your business? And from the perspective of a dealer, like, what should they be looking for?
Because if a dealer would work with you and stay with you, there has to be a reason.
I actually had this conversation this morning with an auto tech founder. We were talking about like, you know, how do you,
how do you build that system for the dealer so that it's the best offering for them in the market and they don't want to go somewhere else.
So how do you think about that? Like, what type of features or, you know, how do you, what do you build for the dealer to make it so easy that they don't leave or go anywhere else?
Yeah, I'd say two things. Number one, if somebody's telling you it's set and forget it, I would run. Don't walk, run away from that vendor.
So it's not set and forget it?
No, how could it be? You're replacing a human. Like, I'm just, it's a very nice thing to say in a sales demo and I'm sure it closes a lot of deals because
that's a nice, that's a nice thought. But it's the, it's the same as when you, you know, back in the day, you've got these third party
lead companies that were like, oh, yeah, we'll answer your phone and we'll, we'll, you know, we'll do the BDC work and
it's a nice thought that you can just outsource that to somebody and like they take care of it and they're going to do a great job.
But in the reality, it was never the case. So I think the number one thing is if people are saying it's set and forget, it's just not.
It's not because you're, it's replacing human labor. It's really difficult and there should be a the like we were going on site
10, 20 times more than we ever have in the history of the company and we take on the responsibility
of making sure that we train
Jerry to your dealership because there are literally thousands of things that an individual dealer
is going to want to adjust with an agent for any given use case.
So that's number one.
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Slash n a d a or click the link in the show notes below. Well said, okay
So the reason i'm smiling is because I uh, I just went into circles our dealer peer group
Which I talk about often and I searched podium and I like to do this
This is like the this is the market research part of the conversation
So let's uh, let's see what real dealers have said over the past 30 days about podium
This is again, it could be comments questions feedback. I don't know. All right. So one dealer said
Really considering podiums jerry for our website chat tool and check out their voice ai option
So you so I don't think you did voice ai last time we spoke. Is that new?
Yeah, so we launched that in the last three months
And it was a brand new product brand new
Channel and it's the most important channel in deal in the dealership. Okay, interesting
So this other guy said
We can't switch to a dms yet, but very curious about podium service ai voice
Interesting another guy said I am now on tekyan crm and just on boarded podium ai
Um, he said there's starting voice ai. This was just now. So maybe he's just wasn't aware of it
I guess he's saying he's on tekyan crm. So you obviously integrate with all the dms's and crms
You don't have to replace my crm to do that
By the way, anyone in circles can do exactly what i'm doing right now
They can all search themselves and see this that like this is totally real
How do you think about integrating as i'm as i'm going through more comments
How do you think about integrating with other systems? Uh, from the from the perspective of
You know, there's so many bolt-on solutions today in the market and like you said, we have too much software
So how do you make that part easy the integration with other systems? Yeah, it's necessary and challenging because
Back in the day
When we were just doing web chat or reviews product or whatever like the integration
Was simple. Hey, send us the font send us a the file of people that bought a car
We'll send out this message blah blah blah blah blah or what you know
We'll install web chat on your website and the website lead comes through we write that to the crm and the dms
No big deal now
We need real-time
api access real-time updates from the dms crm service platform
And it's super complicated and in many here's the thing is you want these ai agents or these
These ai employees to act like a human and do human work
You got to give them access to all the systems and the the information like a human
And it's it's been a massive challenge like we built an entire product
In podium called watch tower and it basically monitors every integration we have
All the time 24 7 and rock. Yeah, make sure it's working because these these integrations break the data from the break
And we don't want our customers calling us telling us that jerry's not working for
You know, it doesn't have access to the inventory or whatever it is
And so we built this whole product
Just to make sure that these integrations work for us
And I think the interesting thing is this stuff as the as ai becomes more and more capable
The need for really good data integration is and workflow integration is not going to slow down and I don't know where it goes
I agreed
So when you say
This this needs a lot of customization makes sense
Who's doing this work at the dealership and like what does the graph look like?
Like do I do a lot of it up front and then it kind of you know tapers really quickly or
Is it the gm the bdc manager? Who's doing this work?
so we see a lot of like bdc manager gsm even general manager and
I think this is the if if I were in my podium sales mode right now
I would say this is the one thing that
drastically differentiates us from most of the other players out there is
We have a thing called ai studio
And that has all of these agents that are built into it a trainer agent a planner agent all these things and that
ai studio is where you go to train your to train jerry
To train your agents to give you skills to give it playbooks
So there's like a there's a there's an easy way for me to actually build the process here
So that you know, I can add this ai employee to to my let me let me run you through like a
What we would say is a typical and what a typical onboarding experience like we you sign up
We do a kickoff call immediately. We get all the integrations set up
blah blah blah and then
We go through and we work with you to build and we have like we feel like jerry's
80% good enough out of the box because I mean everybody's selling cars
They want to do it differently, but the businesses are similar and then there's like this 20 percent more
that
custom playbooks custom
instructions
fill and and so the
The onboarding is we start with jerry 80 percent of the way there and then you get into ai studio
We interview you we go on your website
We pull all the information we can about your business
But then we need you to tell us a lot of what how you want things done
How do you want people to schedule test drives? How do you want people to handle service appointments?
Do you you know like there's there's all this stuff and so we do that and then we're not done because
Over the next 60 days
You are going to be in there and and the nice thing about ai studio is you can do these test runs
Which is like simulating very typical conversations in sales or service
And you can see how jerry is going to respond to these very very common
Test run conversations and then what we see is that over 60 days
You're going to get jerry to a really good spot, but then the cool thing is you can give jerry new skills
You can decide that jerry is going to have a skill of talking about uh vehicle
buybacks or
Leases you know leases are out for whatever whatever the skill is you can target it for what's relevant to you
Yeah, and and the nice thing is any conversation any interaction that jerry has had with any customer
We we have the ability inside a podium you click on it. You say give feedback
You type out your feedback in plain english and then our trainer agent
And this ai studio takes that and actually it adjusts the playbooks and the instructions for jerry so that moving forward
Super cool what you want
So let's read a couple more. This is fun. So
I'm just going in order. So i'm still on what like three days ago or something
Um, so someone said they're looking for a tool that has the ability to upload a customer list
And mark it to it through email and text. This is a four dealer
Someone responded podium may have some capability there. We haven't used it ourselves, but our rep spoke about it
Okay, do you I mean that sounds to me like
Table stakes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah
Um, someone said
We've used podium. They've been a great partner. So good for you. I'm trying. I got to find a spicy one too
We got it. We got to find somebody that's
I know they're out
All right, well after this one. So he wrote good timing. I just got a he said let me one second
I just set up automated follow-ups for ai text with jerry
Uh, he said we don't have any crm integration yet. He said it's his fault. Um, but he said you do have a text conversation
Again, I don't want to give away who the dealer is so i'm trying to kind of keep it a non
All right, let's see someone that is not happy. Um, this guy next one said I love
I love podiums ai tool jerry. He uses the text widget on our website. We get a ton of engagement
He wrote he in quotations handles the conversations very well. Okay, so this this is this is not that spicy
But this person said that
They use podium
But only with after hours leads because he said that his team
And I quote doesn't have the heart or commitment
Oh, no
I think he's saying that he doesn't want to force his team to do it after hours
So he only uses podium for after hours, which is interesting by the way
Uh, because he's not this person is not using it during the day
I mean, dude, listen, no bs. Like you mean people are saying good things are good for you
I send a personal email to every I mean we have 60,000
Probably closer to 70,000 customers now
And I send a personal email to all of them
After they're like once they're 15 days into onboarding because we feel like that's when you know things start to could start to go
Wrong and I get a lot of like I get a lot of people like this is great
We love it and then you get people it's awesome because I get these personal emails every day from customers
Are like, hey, it's not going well. Here's why and we have this channel
Where we we immediately attack those problems and solve them and
Um, so I know they're out there. I know there are detractors out there, but oh, okay, so
I'm sorry. So I actually do have one here
So I'll just give you an summary. This person is basically thinking of
replacing podium
with
A cr a more comprehensive crm. What do you think about that?
Like how could that how could someone do that to
Like doesn't podium add new features to my crm. So how could like a or is there a crm out there that does
Something similar what podium already does
Yeah, I mean, I don't I mean there are obviously crms that have some ai capability
There are crms that do you know, obviously serums do texting and communication. I don't know what this customer is using
My guess it my best guess would be that they maybe aren't using our ai
But they're using us for like web chat and all their communication and that they might be moving over to consolidate on their crm
the way I see things
a year
from now
like
Two years ago podium was a communication and marketing platform that sits on top of the dms and the crm and
It helps dealers convert more of their leads because the tool the software was better than
If they were trying to use this out of any other crm or dms
Or obviously always making it better now that our engineers can produce more it can get better faster
But I don't see that as a competitive advantage for much longer. I just think
It's going to be table stakes and all softwares really good. And so
Yep
My focus is build the best agents because the agents are what actually produces value now
It's not people are going to be in two years. They're not going to be very
Excited about some software. They have to log in and click around and like your word for me
Your team. Yeah, it's like I'm not why why would I do that even even a podium? We don't want to buy another software
Nope, the best thing I have
I I saw on twitter was like, you know every piece of software is just an obstacle to you getting what you want
Everything right when I click on that phone and I click on uber. I just want the car to show up
I have to go through these like clicks and stuff and so as that it gets eliminated
Then things get quicker for everyone now put that in a business case
I'm at the service drive right the customer is calling in whatever it may be
Or I'm calling the customer as I shorten that distance
The faster things become the more efficient. I am as a dealer to my operation. Here's one more again
Not that spicy, but it shows maybe some
Some awareness
This this dealer maybe is lacking some awareness. He was basically he's basically saying that
verbatim like a large portion of our sales are out of state
And he's saying that Jerry the AI bot is responding
Initially with asking to set up an appointment for a test drive
And he feels like they look extremely uninformed for long distance leads
But then someone is responding to him and telling him that you can just control that and you could change that right?
Yeah, yeah
Which most of what we're most of what okay, but we it's interesting because you're such a founder
You're like, let's go. Let's go. Well, I love it because I think this is the key to almost any business
And I've only been doing this for 12 years
So they're probably some dealer principle gonna listen to this and be like, you don't know what you're talking about
but what I have found is
being fast is the number one competitive advantage it always has been and it now is
Now that is the case even more than any in time in history because of AI so
um
We were fast to adopt AI to build agents
We built agents in 2023 when nobody was thinking about it and we learned all these lessons
We learned that like you can't just build one agent for auto dealers for bdc
And then create a bunch of toggles that that are the only thing that you can do for customization
And so this is a great example like a year and a half ago
You might not have been able to tell jerry like hey
We have a lot of out-of-state customers
Be sure to ask them if they are in state or not before scheduling an appointment
That would not have been something that we would have had to send that to our engineering team to actually update your specific
Agent now. It's a good one though. That's a great use case. Yeah, I like that one. Yeah
Well, that's the thing
Again, it's not hard for a human to think that right? Hey, this lead comes in
I should make sure that they actually live close to our dealership before I scheduled the test drive
But AI is not you know, that's I think the challenge of AI is it's you're kind of teaching it like
Like it's somebody that it's like a brand-newsing person
Eric what type of ROI are you targeting for dealers when you you know
When your sales team is on the field and like they're showing them the whole up your presentation a demo
What's the ROI that they tend to expect or that you're promising?
Yeah, so I mean like huge uplift in
scheduled test drives huge uplift in scheduled service appointments and then on the service side where we've launched
are offering there it's like
Make sure things do not fall through the cracks like if I were to say the one thing as I've as I've learned more about
Fixed operations of these dealerships things falling to I mean the service advisor is the most difficult job in the dealer
I don't care what anybody else says
It is the most difficult because
It's have you ever I'm dating myself. I hate I have I have I've been in service. I hate it service
It's it's it's horrible. It's like, uh, there's this I love lucy
Uh clip. I mean that's like from the 50s or 40s is black and white
But like there's this thing where her and her friend are at a chocolate factory and they're trying to like
Package up these chocolates and they just keeps going faster and the chocolates just start going everywhere
and I feel like that's the day in the life of a service advisor and so
Anyway, we want to make sure that nothing slips through the cracks in service
That you're always staying up to date because the two things that people call in for service about are I want a scheduled appointment
Or I want an update on my car that's in the service drive
And so we're helping make sure that everybody gets an appointment book no matter what time or or what way they contact you
And then when their car is in the service drive
We make sure that nothing slips through the cracks because it's as these things escalate to the manager service manager no matter what
They're either escalating when somebody's furious because you know, they didn't get an update on their car until 5 30 p.m
And when it was when they found out that it wasn't going to be done that day or it's getting escalated by podium
Ahead of time because the the service advisor
It slipped through the cracks and we're sending it to the service manager saying hey this person wanted an update on their car
It's been 45 minutes the service advisor hasn't done anything you should you should like step in
But well on the topic of voice AI which is related to that. How do you stack rank there?
There's companies that all they do is voice AI right now and you know, maybe they've been around for a couple of years
Or many they've been around for or in some cases they've been around for much longer
But there are companies that are putting their
100% of their daily brain power into just perfecting just one specific problem within dealership
How can you you know be competitive without like what's your strategy?
Yeah, so I mean first of all we have a big team working on it
And it's our brightest engineers in the whole company
Like our first engineer we ever hired
Works on that product and he's the smartest engineer
We were really lucky our first hire was a buddy of mine from from my computer science program at school
And he I knew he was a genius and it turns out he's like one of the best
Software engineers out there and he just he's just cranking out code. Oh, yeah. Yeah, he's he's yeah
So I would put our voice AI against any AI product out there
Like and the interesting thing is there is a lot you can do right now to make it
As good as possible like latency and end of utterance detection all these things like we're working on all of that
Like having access to information because like what happens is
A customer calls in they say something and then as soon as they're done saying it
The model has to detect that they've ended the sentence and then it has to act on it
So that sends it to an llm to act on it and then you want to respond within like two seconds
And what we've started doing is we started actually
pre
Like we'll start we'll take the first half of the sentence and we can predict with high accuracy what they're talking about
And we start going and fetching the information we need before they even end the sentence and if if it turns out that we were wrong
Oh, so
It's interesting. So anyway, so you're shortening
You're shortening the time to answer the time to response by
basically
Yeah, yeah, because here here's an interesting thing. Yeah, and and it's really really difficult
But what I would I say that
The the main thing that will improve this over time is the the llm's the large language models for voice
specifically like the real-time voice models getting better which no company that offers
No company that offers voice ai for car dealerships is working on their own large language model for for real-time voice
So we kind of just have to like the these will get really good when those models get better
But that's not something that we control that's like open ai and anthropic etc
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Yeah, I also found another comment interesting. This is on your post that you made on x which was someone who was talking about
how
You essentially have a distribution mode right you've been working with thousands of dealers for many many years
And that enables you to scale this so quickly because you've already built that trust you have the client
And if you can scale it quicker right economies of scale you can invest in the product more
Which will make it better for the dealer and
I think the boldest take is like
The first 10 years of your business
Was actually just an accumulation of customers waiting for this moment
Where like, you know, it's it's just like people are saying like the internet was just
You know the foundation for ai like you know, I mean like and the internet was built so that we could have ai
It's kind of like a similar idea here. So a little philosophical, but I I like that framing
Yeah, and I think we're lucky too because we never I think if you like built a crm
Three years ago or if you you were endeavoring to build a crm five years ago to replace the existing incumbents
It was bad timing because that did that's before ai and so now you have this
Product and it probably is better than the incumbents
But it's it's like how much better is it 20% versus today you build a system of
agents
That you know eventually replaces the crm
And that might be five to ten times better than the traditional software crm
So I think it's really interesting again. That's it is philosophical
We just try to go sell the product to our customers
Make sure we serve them really well and innovate on the product and if we do that we feel like the rest takes care of itself
But yeah, I do think there's something there. Basically, we're lucky that we kept
as this like
You know layer of software that sat on top of all the the big crm's dms's for a long time because now
We don't have a
An innovators dilemma like we don't have to destroy and you don't have the technical debt
No, all the technical debt and and by the way the tools that we built the communication tools all the interaction
Products the web chat all these things. They're the perfect tools that an ai
Employee can use to do its job. Yeah, you basically built the front end and now you're doing the back end
Yeah, it's great. Yeah, so what's your what's your plan for any da? I know you're going to be there
I'm going to be there. What's uh, what's your plan there?
Well, we're going to go
We're going to sell the crap out of our new agents for service
And this is the funny thing is we talked to we talked to a top
top
four dealer group
Uh two months ago the cto had never heard of podium
So we actually have a brand recognition problem and a third of dealers in the us use podium
They're paying us right now for podium and what in some shape or form
And the the cto at top three dealer group in the united states had never heard of podium. So we have a major
opportunity to get our
Name out there and so we're going to do a lot more at nada
We're that's why i'm coming on here as much as you'll have me
But like we just need to get the word out there because when people use our product we find that they don't
cancel it which is pretty rare with ai like I think there's a lot of churn and ai products and
Yeah, so that's that's a plan for nad i might try and golf with one of our customers and then we're going to do that
Uh that night golden nights game with you, which will be awesome. Yeah amazing amazing amazing
Eric is there anything I didn't ask you that I should have asked you is there anything
You know lurking in the back of your mind that you're working on that you want to you want to share with everyone listening right now
in service
The three big things we're doing and this is kind of a preview for what if you come talk to us at nada
What you'll hear is the three things we're doing are first of all voice ai to schedule appointments through and and also via text
So like any basically
Anytime somebody reaches out to you
And they want to schedule service
Do it and and we don't care how it's done like if it's done through voice or voice to text or text like it just stays in text
Or we send them a link
We don't care all we're trying to do is make sure everybody that wants to book a service point with you
Books it and we make it as easy as possible. That's number one
Number two, this is like the other half of calls that come into a service
department is what is the update on my
Vehicle and that is the hardest part of the job because you got your service advisor
You're dealing with the people right there in front of you
But you're also getting all these calls and that's where things start to slip through the cracks
And we've built basically the perfect executive assistant for every service advisor in a dealership
So you call in
Your cars your your your f-150s in the in on this in the service drive
You call in if the if the service advisor can't answer our executive assistant answers the phone
Hey, how's it going? Yossi?
I know that you got your Ford f-150 in with us right now and you're working with Eric the service advisor
He's actually not available right now, but I can actually take a note down and get things started
What can I do for you?
And then you're telling me what hey, I want to know what the update on my vehicle is and I can be able to pick it up today
Whatever it is
We're taking that down and then we are servicing that to the service advisor
And like ideally we don't involve the service advisor
But there are some things that the the systems don't tell us today about the status of these vehicles, but
We're servicing that the service advisor
So it doesn't slip through the cracks if it does because these guys are the busiest guys in the dealership
We have and that this is we have an escalation
Feature in podium for both sales and service and we escalate because like if you're a service manager you want to know
And so we're escalating. Hey after a certain amount of time
Which you decide when you escalate this up the chain so we take care of it
And and that's like the second thing we're doing and it's awesome because it basically is giving your service advisors
Superpowers so that they can do their job much better because I mean the number one thing is
It's the busiest part of the dealership. It is the most profitable
But it's just understaffed and so we got to fix that and then and then number three is like
The amount of revenue potential sitting in a service department is massive and they don't do it because there are enough people
so recalls
telematics like tapping into the oem
Portal and figuring out what the the telematics are like who needs to actually come in right now because the vehicle's telling them
They've got a problem all of these areas where we can go do proactive outbound
And and this isn't just us getting a list and sending out some template because I've heard this is like ai people are calling it
It's it's not ai if you take a list and send a template message. That's just automation
ai is
You understand the context of the customer all the information craft a really targeted message
Send it out and then have an agent that's watching and if they don't follow up
They're following up again because like if I need to take my car in for a warranty service or something's wrong with my vehicle
I've got to do it and I know it but I'm probably just putting it off
And so the ai's job is to because nobody else in the in the service departments has the time to do it
The ai should do it for you. So those are the three things
Amazing. Are you excited? I don't know. What do you think?
I think you're pumped
I mean, it's and then the last yeah, the last thing I would say 12 12 years in you still you still got that firing
Yeah, my wife my wife is like you're not quitting anytime soon. Are you I'm like no
This is I've had never had more fun in my life doing this job right now
to go um
But the last thing I would say is if you're a dealer principal or gsm or whatever and you've you've heard the ai pitch
You've used it and you've either liked it or not or whatever like this stuff's coming
We see it in our business right now having massive impact
It's real and I like I would say software engineering the reason why they make so much money
Is because it's probably one of the most sought after difficult to attain skills out there
And so if it's can help software engineers do their job and they don't write a line of code
And they could be 10 times more productive. I guess my point to to everybody out there that's in the dealer world is like
You should expect in the near future. Hopefully it's podium bringing this to you an army of experts
That are helping you grow your dealership and take advantage of all the revenue opportunities that exist
Whether that's like the you know the bottom, you know the 50 to 80 percent of hot of of leads in your system that don't get
Work because only you only work the top 20 percent or whether that's like this massive opportunity in the service department
Uh for telematics and warranty and all of these opportunities that you're just not pulling in because you don't have the the manpower
Amazing work, Eric. Thank you so much for the update. This was fun. It was also fun to bring up, uh, you know, random feedback from the audience
So that's uh, it's always, you know, it's always interesting to keep it that way
So i'm looking forward to seeing you at nada. Uh, we'll put your booth information in the show notes below as well
If anyone wants to come visit you come take a look
Um, you know your your passion definitely everyone can can sense that and you're you're doing some great things for the industry
So eric, thanks so much for coming on and i'm sure we'll have another conversation very soon. Thanks, eric. Thanks, you see
All right, 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
About this episode
Eric Rea, CEO of Podium, discusses the transformative impact of AI on car dealerships, emphasizing the shift from traditional software to AI-driven labor solutions. He highlights how dealerships should prepare for an 'army of experts'—AI agents capable of managing workflows end-to-end. The conversation touches on the current staffing challenges in the industry and the need for dealers to focus on augmenting labor rather than just acquiring more software. Rea shares insights on the evolving market and the necessity for AI to deliver tangible business results.
Original notes
Today I’m joined by Eric Rea, CEO of Podium.
Eric breaks down how AI agents are replacing labor across sales and service, why speed is now the ultimate competitive advantage, and how fixed ops is finally getting real AI help instead of glorified answering services.
This episode is brought to you by:
1. CNA National - CNA National is the premier F&I provider for dealerships nationwide. With more than four decades in the industry, we’ve earned a reputation for service excellence. If you are looking for stability, consistency and experience, look no further than CNA National. Register for your commitment-free F&I profitability analysis by visiting @ https://www.cnanational.com/NADA.
2. Ikon Technologies - Ikon Technologies delivers a connected vehicle program for dealers that maximizes Customer Lifetime Value by driving sales efficiency and securing non-cancellable PVR on your front end while delivering an average of 50 additional customer-pay ROs every single month for your service bays. At NADA 2026 in Las Vegas, visit Stand 1763 West to see the benefits for yourself and take your chance to roll the dice to win a Rolls Royce (terms and conditions apply; no purchase necessary). Plus, as an exclusive offer for listeners, mention “Car Dealership Guy” when you sign up at NADA to have your entire initial installation fee waived—book your demo today @ https://ikontechnologies.com.
3. Podium - 78% of customers buy from the first business that responds, yet most businesses reply an hour or more late. In 2023 Podium deployed AI Employees to close that gap. In 2025 Podium released Jerry 2.0, a massive update that completely reimagines the AI Employee. Businesses now let Podium’s AI Employees handle 40% of their inbound leads, giving teams more time for their customers—and more time home for dinner. Learn what Jerry can do for you here! https://www.podium.com/car-dealership-guy
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Topics:
01:08 How is Podium AI (Jerry) changing dealerships?
04:03 What are the software challenges in dealerships?
06:42 How is AI added to dealerships?
18:45 How does AI personalize customer service?
19:14 What makes a CRM good?
20:03 What is the future of AI?
25:30 How does voice AI help service?
30:07 What are the upcoming plans for Podium?
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