"Fewer Leads, More Sales"– Massive Upsides, Fatal Flaws, and Sobering Reality of AI BDCs | Daniel Kim, Director of Operations at Barnes Crossing Auto Group
Car Dealership Guy Podcast
"Fewer Leads, More Sales"– Massive Upsides, Fatal Flaws, and Sobering Reality of AI BDCs | Daniel Kim, Director of Operations at Barnes Crossing Auto Group
Car Dealership Guy Podcast · Sep 2, 2025
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You know, the problem I have with the RFP process, even if you did, let's say, two or three demos
and spent four hours on a product demo, you never really understand how the product works
or what the product is about.
Maybe you get, I would say, maybe 25% to, if you're lucky, maybe 50%, but you really
don't know how the product works.
So what we did was we split up the stores.
Today, I'm joined by Daniel Kim, Director of Operations at Barnes Crossing Auto Group.
As a seasoned auto tech entrepreneur, Daniel pulls back the curtain on the reality of AI
and dealerships, its massive upsides, its lingering flaws, and the sobering truths leaders need
to know as they bet on the next wave of technology.
A big thank you to our sponsors for making today's episode possible, Wide Whale, Impel,
and CDG Dealer Consulting, and now let's get into the show.
Daniel Kim on the CDG podcast, Daniel, welcome.
Thank you.
You see, it's super exciting to be here.
Really pumped to have you on.
We were coming off what we just had, we called it a dealer data day on Daily Dealer
Live, and it was all about CDPs, dealership data, like, you know, why should I care?
So I feel pretty prepared for this conversation.
Awesome.
Daniel, you are quite an enigma, and I don't say that lightly.
Our consultant worked on AutoTrader, actually.
That's pretty interesting.
We'll talk what that means even.
Founded two companies that many in our industry have heard of, many used, many use currently,
Orbi Carmigo.
You were the founder, and I'd like to understand your founding story there.
Today, you're the director of Operations, and so I don't butcher the name, but, sorry,
Barnes Crossing Auto Group, so basically CIPI.
So you've had a, and you grew up in Indonesia.
So anyway, clearly, I did my homework and read about you, but just tell us a little bit
about, let's start with you yourself before we get into the, you know, all the fun stuff,
right?
Who's Daniel Kim?
Tell us a little bit about your upbringing.
Yeah.
So in terms of Indonesia, so I was a son of a Korean missionary.
So my father, a long time ago, decided to go to the most remote place in Indonesia
in the Borneo Island, which is the biggest island in Indonesia, and he dragged our entire
family there when I was two years old.
So when we got there, we had no electricity, no running water, and just kind of grew up
in the jungles, essentially.
Since then.
What point age was that?
Until, until 10, yeah.
So at 10 years old, I came to the U.S. I came to California because my mother eventually
said that's enough.
My kids need a good education.
So I ended up in the U.S., got my MBA at Wharton, and yeah, that's just kind of how I got started.
From no running water in Indonesia to, you know, working with in the auto business in
the U.S., that's like a very stark transition.
So kind of let's, yeah, please tell us more about your story.
Like I want to, I want to lead up to that.
But one quick question is you, as someone coming from those types of beginnings,
you know, what was your drive?
I mean, you said you went to Wharton.
That's not an easy fee to even get accepted, you know, let alone complete a Wharton degree.
Like, tell us a little bit more about your personality.
What drove you to, you know, go down that path?
Yeah.
Yeah.
First of all, graduating from Wharton is actually not that difficult, as one might
assume.
It's the getting in part.
But yeah, I think just my parents, you know, they had a really strong work ethic
and they just always expected me to be, try to be the best at whatever I did.
So I've always kind of worked hard.
There isn't kind of this like, hey, I'm going to like some mantra I live by, but I try
to do the best in everything that I do.
And yeah, that's, I think that's why I got to go to Wharton as one of the things.
So tell us about your first exposure.
By the way, I had some very fun times at parties at Penfraz and whatnot.
So I went out to University of Pennsylvania.
I didn't go to UPenn, but I did, I did party there.
So that's my stamp of approval at some points.
Tell me a little bit about your first venture into automotive.
Not your first venture, but you are being consulting.
I read that about you and you had worked, you literally was, you were retained by
auto trader to work under acquisition to Cox Automotive and just, can you give
us the background there?
Yeah.
I want to understand what that experience was like.
Yeah.
So kind of accidentally fell into automotive.
After Wharton, I was a consultant at Bain, and it happened to be that our first
client that I worked on was auto trader.
So this was before, I think, Cox, before Cox Automotive, right?
So I think Chip Perry and Steve Greenfield, which are both still in the industry today,
legends.
They hired us to do all of the post merger integration work after they had just bought
Vin Solutions, Kelly Bluebook, Viado, HomeNet.
So I kind of got a firsthand experience of what automotive tech was all about that
served vendor that served dealers.
And from looking at all these companies, I just kind of realized, wow, these guys
are making a lot of money and being sold for a lot of money.
And that's kind of one of the reasons why I ended up starting my own company.
So and what company was that?
Orbi.
Okay.
So tell us about that transition.
So you're, at this point in your life, I'm going to guess it's like the mid 2010s,
correct me if I'm wrong, right?
You're exposed to automotive and you see an opportunity which goes to become Orbi.
So tell us, what was that opportunity?
Auto trader.
So one of the companies that we actually, sorry, that we actually looked at was Carvana
because they were also based out of Atlanta.
So we looked at them and then I remember seeing, you know, they used to have those, I mean,
they still do, but the 360 widget or where you could actually see the 360 view of the
car.
I think they might have been one of the first ones that started that technology.
That's right.
That's right.
So I looked at it and I was like, well, I should probably try to do that for car
dealerships, like just, you know, regular franchise car dealerships.
So and, you know, it's so funny, right?
As an entrepreneur, sometimes not knowing is the courage you need to start something
because I didn't even know this type of technology already existed back then.
So I went to the nearest university, found a bunch of engineers, which was a UC Irvine
because I lived in Irvine, California, made a product that kind of worked and our
first customer was CarMax.
That customer, sorry, our first demo was with CarMax.
Okay.
I'm going to say that that's a, that's a big whale to pull for a first customer.
Yeah.
Right.
And, and I think it was just sheer stupidity or just not knowing what was out there,
but that's how we got started.
Obviously, that's not what Orbi is today.
We went through this phase of being trying to become a 360 type, you know, photo
widget for dealers to doing a lot of analytics.
I think our, we first made our big splash when we detected a lot of bot traffic.
This was back in like 2016.
We got published with PCG, Brian Pash.
And then that's kind of how we got put on the map.
And now today Orbi is essentially a CDP.
I think we were probably one of the first companies to talk about a CDP probably
circa 2017, 2018.
So to my surprise, when I see the industry today, I'm like, wow, everybody has a CDP.
What do you tell me about, I want quick pause there, but what do you currently do as director
of operations at the group?
Yeah.
So very tech background.
I think operations, I think slinging metal or reconning cars.
So what does your scope comprise of?
Yeah.
So I work at our corporate office of we were a dealership of, you know, 16 rooftops
and my main, you know, responsibilities, digital marketing, right?
Because that's kind of my background.
And then also handling the BVC department and then also vendor management.
So those are kind of the three big buckets that I look at.
I'm a little less involved in kind of the like less of like a platform director type
person where we're digging into the weeds and trying to make, you know, trying to
look as salespeople and things like that.
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Yeah. Before we get deeper into your day to day now and what you're
working on. What did you what are the at being a vendor literally building
technology for dealerships?
Like what did that teach you before you actually became a retailer as a
vendor? What challenges for dealerships were you exposed to?
Like what were you seeking to fix?
Because today you're literally running the technology for many stores.
And so I'm trying to understand were there any major themes that you
were that you notice that hey, these are the areas where I really
think dealers need support.
Dealership technology in many cases is not great.
And so I'm curious to know what stood out to you the most in terms of
challenges and opportunities conversely within the space being on the
vendor side.
Yeah. Yeah. That's a good question.
I mean, I think the biggest issue is the lack of resources you have
sometimes, whether you're a single, you know, store or single rooftop
dealership or even at our scale at 16 rooftops, you don't have a lot of
technical capabilities.
So trying to really help dealers almost become a part of their an
extension of their staff and and really drilling down deep and
figuring out where opportunities lies.
I think that was the biggest lesson I learned and that's where you can
add the most amount of value for the dealerships that you work with as
a vendor.
Okay. Now talk to us about present day.
What are you focused on nowadays?
We talk lots about voice AI, text AI, customer data platforms, right?
My data being clean, which why does that matter to me as a dealer?
Well, it matters because I'm going to get more bang for my buck when
I'm targeting customers, when I'm doing outreach and you could
tell us more about this.
But there's so much, there's so much happening at once.
Dealers have sort of turned from selling these, you know, pieces of
metal to being technologists.
It's pretty crazy when you think about what drives this business
nowadays.
And so back to you, like, what are you focused on in your role now
day to day?
Yeah, I think two things.
One, AI, right?
I mean, how many times do we talk about AI also on a car
dealership guy, right?
So currently we have AI agents.
So we have a centralized BDC at Barnes Crossing Auto Group.
And we use AI agents to be the first line of communications for all the
customers who put in leads or who submit a lead to our dealership.
And then the second thing is around ownership of data.
I think there's been a lot of talk around CDPs and using data to leverage
yourself, right?
And I think our industry has done a pretty good job in finally getting
other vendors to give dealers access to their own data.
So I think we've kind of gone through that change.
Now it's out there, but there's a lack of coordination between all of the
data that all the different vendors are pulling, right?
So one of the things that we're working on at Barnes Crossing
Auto Group is building our own data warehouse where we bring in all
of the data from all the vendors that we work with.
And then being able to normalize it, do some data hygiene, identity resolution,
things like that.
And then being able to then use that data to have a coordinated effort in
reaching out to your customers as well as planning and strategy for
the dealership while we control the data, that is ours, right?
So I think those are the two things that I'm working on right now.
Okay, so you're trying to get access to all your data.
Is this, like, how difficult is this?
Your mid-process clearly, I mean, you're doing it now.
For a dealer that's listening that maybe hasn't started, maybe has.
But like, how challenging is it really?
It sounds, and it sounds silly, right?
It's like, it's your data, of course you have access to it.
But things are always more complicated than they seem.
So tell us about that process.
Yeah, I think for the majority of the main CRM and DMS vendors,
for the most part, there is a way to extract data, right?
So I think that part is not as difficult.
I think the most difficult part is actually then normalizing it in a way that you can use it.
And I'll give you an example, right?
When you get a dump of data, first of all, it's just all in different tables, right?
So you might have a table for salespeople, a table for all the cars
that you sold, a table for all the stores and so on and so forth.
And if you don't map the data or create any kind of relationships
between all the different data points, then there isn't really a way to use it.
And this kind of comes back to the difficulties that a lot of the dealerships face
because how many dealerships do you know you'll see that actually uses
or has their own data scientist at their dealership?
Not many.
Not many, right?
So I think that is kind of the hardest part of what I've been kind of facing
as on the vendor side because, you know, back at Orbi or at Carmigo,
I had a group of developers that I can go to and say,
hey, these are some of the things I need to get done versus now I don't have that.
OK, so how did you let go about this process?
How are you doing it today?
You said you don't have those resources.
You said that's a challenge.
So what's been your solution?
Yeah, so it's been about relying on the vendors
that are willing to be the right partner with you.
I think that's been kind of the biggest learning that I've had.
It's a lot harder to even though our dealer principal, he's great.
He's very supportive.
He's a great businessman trying to go to him and tell him, hey,
we need to hire a data engineer for $150 to $200,000 a year.
It's a pretty difficult sell.
And also on the same, on that point, even if you hire that person,
who's going to manage that person, right?
So the next kind of place that I looked at was who are some of the vendors
who aren't just there to sell a product to me, but who is willing
to actually build out some of the things that we wanted to do as a dealer group, right?
So that's what I've been relying on.
So so give us the plugs.
We want all the details.
So let's go give us like step by step, like, who are you working with today?
How are you working with them?
All right, let's start with the names.
Who are you working with today?
Yeah. So in terms of the CDP or the AI, so AI agents currently we're working with Impel.
We just got off of a, a bake off, a Pepsi challenge where we did a pre exhaustive kind
of RFP of all the, you know, AI solution providers that were out there,
like Matador, Numa, you know, Podium.
And we did a bake off with another vendor versus Impel.
And we just recently made a decision to have all of our chat agents or AI chat
agent to be with Impel.
So would you say a bake off?
I don't think it's something that, you know, it's very common word, wording,
hint in the dealership world.
What did you actually do?
So you ran, I understand the context.
You ran like, you ran an RFP process, right?
Like a shopping process here, a comparison.
But how did you actually do this?
So, you know, the problem I have with the RFP process, even if you did,
let's say two or three demos and spent four hours on a product demo,
you never really understand how the product works or what the product is about.
Maybe you get, I would say maybe 25% to, if you're lucky, maybe 50%,
but you really don't know how the product works.
So what we did was we split up the stores, half of them got Impel
and another half got a different solution.
No way.
And yeah, we set up metrics on what dictated success
and we just kind of let it roll.
But how do you actually do this?
Like practically speaking, it doesn't take 10 minutes to implement one of these tools.
So how, practically speaking, how do you actually do this, right?
Even, like I said, we just had Ryan Roman on the podcast,
20 something stores, Roman Art Group, and he was talking about,
spending a year and a half on his CDP implementation process, cleaning up his data.
So how are you able to be so nimble and run this kind of dual track process
where you have two separate platforms powering your dealerships?
How do you actually do that?
Yeah, so it's not the most efficient way to, I think, select a vendor,
but I think in the long term, it really helps you find a partner
and a solution that you can stick with.
Because the flip side is you can select one vendor,
but you're also very familiar with dealerships that will switch vendors every three to six months
because they are not happy with the product that they selected.
And I think one of the other benefits that I realized was,
during the bake off or the Pepsi challenge,
the vendors will really, really make sure that you are taken care of
in terms of some of the things you need,
custom work, because they're still trying to earn your business.
So I think in that sense, it was very helpful.
Okay, so what did you learn throughout this process?
Our main purpose of using an AI agent is to help our BDC agents to be more effective,
meaning they are able to handle way more leads without a dropping quality.
So for example, ever since we've implemented an AI agent, our centralized BDC,
and now handles 50% more leads, I think each BDC agent is now at around 300 leads a month,
versus I think an industry average around 200,
while still maintaining a 99% plus contact rate without also a loss in effectiveness.
So that was what I was looking for.
An AI solution that can help empower and make our sales or BDC agents a lot more effective.
So that was our number one goal.
And then throughout the process, what I learned is that obviously there was a winner,
but I realized that vendors who are willing to provide help in this process
and be a partner with you is really the type of vendor that you want to work with.
So for example, at our dealership, I'm one of three people at the corporate level
outside of HR and accounting that work on these corporate level initiatives.
So in order to do a bake off, in order to make sure that the AI agent is implemented properly,
I need help from our vendor partners to do audits to help tweak the product,
to communicate with our BDC managers, to train our BDC agents sometimes in person.
And there was a vendor that clearly did this really well for us,
which was in Pell. That's who we decided to go with because their product was good.
And also at the same time, they provided exceptional service and worked as a partner to
work through some of the challenges, including trying to add a Southern twang to our AI chat
agents because our dealerships are in the South.
That's awesome. So you mentioned you've implemented these agents,
which you just spoke about. And that has gone into your BDC. Have you done anything else with
when it comes to AI or is that the primary use case today at your dealership?
Look, I'm trying to get like you built dealership technology beforehand.
And so I'm trying to understand what have been the biggest wins for you.
It seems like this has been agents have been a big win for you,
based on what you're describing. Has there been anything else that you've implemented
that has been a major win throughout this learning process?
Outside of sales agent AI. Another thing that we're currently working on is putting an LLM or
an AI layer on top of our data warehouse. So that is still a project that we're working on.
Let me be able to query or like search all your data and like ask anything.
Finally, all the customers that purchase red cars under 30,000 miles during Christmas
in the last 10 years. Yeah. And this I have a funny story about this.
I mean, there's a one of the reasons why I wanted to do this is because I get a lot of phone calls
from our general managers who are amazing at what they do, but they will also call me one day at
a lot of the times and be like, Hey, Daniel, I'm not selling any cars this week.
Like what's going on? Right? Like, what do I need to focus on to,
to, you know, sell more cars this week? And, you know, I joke that I'm going to
replace my phone number with an AI chatbot that they will text and the AI chatbot will
respond to them and say, Hey, I'm, yeah, I'm not selling cars. What's the problem? And it crunches
all my entire everything. Oh, it's like your close rate has dropped significantly.
Like, you know, da, da, da. Exactly. Like, Hey, we noticed that your appointment set to
show is quite low. Are you confirming your appointments? You know, things like that,
right? Well, but you're, we're laughing, but like, why is that not going to be the reality
very soon? It seems like it's the lowest-hanging fruit there is. You don't even need any new software.
You kind of just need to, like you said, put an LLM or some, you know, attach some software to
your database, which I'm trying, right? DMSs will do or someone. Right. And essentially,
the way I look at AI in the dealership world and is, you know, they are there to help
assist, become tools for automotive dealer employees. So for our agents, essentially what I
noticed when I first went into the BDC was that our central BDC, they had a stopwatch every six
minutes. People are checking all the leads and bin solutions and making sure that all the leads
are responded to within six minutes. And a lot of the times what our BDC agents would do is
they would go in there and they see like six leads that just came in and they need to, you know,
respond as soon as possible. So what they end up doing is they will literally copy paste templates
without really having the time to look at what the actual conversation is about or without kind
of gaining any kind of context or knowledge. And I don't blame them because they're just trying
to do their job versus with an AI agent. It will look at the context of what the customer
is looking for and actually respond in a much more meaningful and thoughtful way
and do it in under 30 seconds to a minute. Do you think all dealers need a customer data platform
nowadays? How important is this? Because you don't like in order to have a BDC sales agent
that's AI, I don't need a CDP for that. So what do you think here is like, what's your opinion
on just customer data platforms in general based on dealer size and scale?
Yeah. So I'm going to say more, I kind of called the data operating system. I'm corning the term here
on car dealership guy, but to have a competitive edge in the future, you are going to have to
have a complete set of data that you can run analysis on to tell, to understand what your
business needs to do as well as be able to target the right type of customers for you to be
effective. The reason why I'm trying to get owner or I'm building out a CDP or a data platform
from our dealership's perspective, meaning we own the data, is because then we can control
a lot of the flow to other vendor partners. And we have way more choices in terms of how
we activate these customers, including some of the third party platforms that are outside of
automotive that wouldn't be accessible if you were to use a CDP that's built by a CDP company
only specializing in the automotive industry. And when you say you have more choices how to
activate, what does this mean? The expensive mean layman's term. Yeah. So for example,
if you wanted to direct mail, right now, you're going to have to work with a direct
mail printing company, right, that will probably charge you, I would say some are between depending
on the type of mail piece, you know, $1.20 to maybe even $1.80 a piece, right per contact that
they send to most of the time, these people will just find third party data sources to kind
of send mailers to if I have control over my own data, I could just go and work with a
Silicon Valley tech company like Lobb, who does one to one direct mail based on kind of the customer
journeys that you could send set and at a much lower price, something like probably 80 even lower
sometimes cents a person. So Daniel, I am curious to know like, what have just been the overall
results you've seen from, you know, you've implemented a CDP, right, you're working with
AI agents. But at the end of the day, you mentioned your dealer principle, right? When you go and you
chat with your dealer principle, like what is that end result? How do you quantify that ROI?
Yeah, so I'll be honest with you, this is still a month six of my job. So we are still in process
in terms of working on a data platform. But how I envision it is there's a lot of manual
processes and lack of immediate data availability for our dealer principle. So my number one
goal and it's launching probably end of this month early next month is to provide a enterprise level
dashboard with the key important metrics that we can customize that, you know, can be readily
accessible to all the leadership at our dealer group. What do you think those metrics are
going to be like? What KPIs are you tracking? Oh, KPIs in terms of just, I would say I would
start with the basics. Right? What is literally how many leads did you get? How many appointments
were set? How many appointments were shown? How many people actually bought cars? What kind of cars?
What was your front and gross back and gross? Just kind of your key metrics and then allowing them to
understand which areas or which stores need help, because that's kind of what our dealer
principle does, right? He will go and visit stores that are not performing as well. And that type
of data will give additional information for him to go there and be a lot more prescriptive
about what the store needs to do to improve. This episode is brought to you by CDG Dealer Consulting.
We all know the right tech can make or break a dealership, so don't guess and don't do it alone.
Backed by insights from 500 plus dealerships and completely free for dealers, CDG Dealer
Consulting audits your tech stack, recommends the right products and vendors and secures
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costly mistakes so you can hit the ground running. So discover dealership tech that
actually works at CDGDealerConsulting.com or click the link in the show notes below.
That's CDGDealerConsulting.com. Yeah. So going quickly back to your AI Bakeoff,
is there anything else you learned throughout that process? It seems like a super valuable
just learning process in general, but other than this, you made your selection, you implemented
agentic or sales agents into your BDC, which will be my next question as well. What's that
been like? But anything, any other learning throughout that process, just about AI within
your store, right, eating employees, replacing employees, what that's been like?
Yeah. I mean, this is some of the things that I tell all our BDC agents is that, look,
AI is not going to replace you. Maybe in, I don't know, maybe in the near distant future.
That's controversial, by the way. I've spoken to many people on this platform who
have the opposite opinion. They say it is reducing my BDC, but many people agree with you as well.
It's been very like 50-50. All right. For me, I think people who know how to use AI are the
ones that are going to be successful at the dealership, right? So if you, because right now,
we've got a process in our BDC department where our BDC agents need to work alongside AI
to make sure that they're doing a good job, right? So I think that that's kind of the biggest thing
that I kind of talk about is, hey, you have to learn how to use some of these AI platforms.
And what? Just let them arm them with that and assume that you're going to have the same
headcount, just a more efficient headcount. Is that the idea?
Yes. And to that point, we might need less people, right? So with AI, I look at it as handling
little bit less like lower value tasks, such as correct that first initial response.
Voice AI is still, you know, some might not be that far away, but it's still not very good
because it's a lot harder to implement. And, you know, so what I've started doing is with our
BDC agents, they're now just focusing on phone calls in the first 24 hours of the lead
coming in, as opposed to back then sending texts, sending emails. Oh, you're just focused on one
channel and I understand what you're saying. Right. And I'm really focusing on the call inputs
plus helping AI agents when they need help. And then also having my BDC department
focus on the first 72 hours and then allowing AI to kind of go focus on the longer term follow-up.
Got it. Daniel, has your marketing mix changed since you've started using, you know, sales agents?
I just think logically, right, if I can respond at a much lower cost to every lead,
am I more inclined to work with every single listing site to get, to claw every
lead I can into the ecosystem because I get more shots at net. Has any of that been part of your
decision-making? Have you changed your marketing mix? Tell us about that. Yeah, yeah. We've drastically
reduced our advertising per vehicle spend as a group. That's something that I'm very proud of.
We've reduced our advertising per vehicle spend by $200 per car, which I think is very
significant. Part of it is kind of the background that I've had in terms of, you know,
understanding value and looking for vendors who are going to provide us with opportunities
at a fair price. And then on the flip side, through process and implementing AI agents,
we've been able to increase our lead to conversion rate by 20%. All right, so we're spending less
and we have less leads that are coming in, but we're currently selling more cars than we did
before because we're a lot more efficient with the leads that we have. Got it. Spending
less, fewer leads, more efficient with current leads, marketing mix. Has it changed? Have you
turned up the dial in any marketing? And I understand you're spending less in aggregate.
Are you spending more on specific things or the same? Yeah, I would say we've been a lot more
targeted with third-party listing sites. So, all in all, I think here's how I would summarize
this, right? You implemented sales agents. For you, it's been very successful. You've
pretty much, like you said, you're letting your team focus on phone as a primary channel and the
rest, you're going to your sales agents for the first 24 hours. As part of that process,
right, you have implemented a customer data platform. You are structuring your data so you
can use it in more ways. Am I missing something? Right, like, what are the skeletons in the
closet here? Like, what don't I know about how you've gone through a pretty rigorous
process that you've even, you've had this bake off, right? What am I missing? Like,
what am I not asking you here? Or what don't we know that we should? Why is every
dealer not doing this yesterday? Just lack of resources and trying to manage my time.
So, for example, we are going through an entire dealership website revamp,
including figuring out all the GTM tags that are slowing our site to improving our,
you know, call to action buttons to improving our speed. And it's just, it's so much, right? I think,
I think one of the things that I learned in, in on the retail side when I came in was, I don't think
there is a specific complex, like very complex concept per se. But there are many concepts
that you have to learn and get used to it. There's so many different things that you need
to pay attention to. And that's been kind of my biggest struggle, right? Because I've got all of
these things that I want to do, right? I'm a tech founder, I know technology, but then, you know,
it's just this struggle to find the right way to get to where I need to without having
internal staff members that I can rely on. Totally. And I think that's the biggest
difference that I see. What departments are you primarily using these agents and, you know,
you're kind of injecting AI? Is it all departments like sales, service, BDC, or you just focus on
some departments specifically? Yeah, just on the sales and service of BDC currently.
They know, in what way did you try AI and service? Yeah, I think, I think the service AI,
it might have been, you know, the vendor that we decided to go with previously, but
it just, it just blew up on us in terms of just the confusion, it caused the customers,
didn't really decrease our call volume, maybe scheduled some appointments, couldn't really
figure out in terms of giving status updates on cars. And it was just not a effective experience
for us. So, we've put a pause on it. We will revisit it in the future versus I think on the
sales side. One, it's more text-reliant. So, I think it's more baked as of today. And I think
there's solutions out there that can really help augment your BDC or sales department on the lead
follow-up side of things. So, what's next? Like, what do you, what do you, I didn't ask you
time frame of how recently you've implemented this. But I'm curious, now that, you know,
you have your stores running this way, what's the next project for you? Like, where's your focus
shifting to? Yeah. So, we've just launched our data warehouse. We have DMS and CRM data in a,
in a relatively manageable way. 4Is has been really helpful in that sense in helping us get
there alongside with MPEL because they have a partnership. And, you know, with that, I'm
now in the process of putting two things on top of it. A BI layer and a LLM model on top of our data
warehouse. So, what that means is BI layer because, because the biggest frustration that I had was
every time I tried to pull reports from my CRM platform, I wanted to shoot myself.
I'm a very analytics heavy person. And just the, the lack of flexibility, how long it took
to update every time I tried to create a new report, outdated UI, just really wanted to
made me want to, you know, bang my head against the computer. So, you know, that was kind of the,
the reason why I wanted to start a creative data warehouse, bolt on a business intelligence
tool on top that I can share with leadership, so that everybody is on the same page and they
know what is expected of them. Because if you don't measure it, then how do you know
you're successful? And then afterwards work on a platform where now we can use LLM models to first
teach it to understand what the data means, right? Because if it doesn't have any context around
what a vehicle is or where to look for vehicles or customers or things like that,
then the data is kind of useless. But once we have that, then using an LLM model to
provide insight and support to the greater staff that works at our, our dealership group.
Well, we'll have to get you back on the platform to tell us how that went,
because it sounds like you're working on quite the fun project. One quick question there. You
mentioned you want to put like a business intelligence tool over your data. What does
that look like? Or like, what are you actually using for that? Yeah, so we have our data
warehouse in Snowflake. So Snowflake is a pretty, it's pretty well used data warehouse.
And, and you know, to the people who are listening to this podcast, you're like,
oh my gosh, how do I do this? You know, obviously happy to tell you how I did it too. But like,
it's not like I'm in their writing code for all this stuff, right? I am finding the right partners
to help me with this. So just want to kind of make that that clear. On top of Snowflake,
it's not very difficult to put on a BI tool like, you know, Tableau or Power BI from
Microsoft or, you know, there's a little cheap little data platform.
A visualization tool. Correct, correct. Yeah, a way to kind of query data and then show graphs
and charts and whatnot. So we're, yeah, so we have that set up now. After, so then once I have
that, then I have to create actual reporting by querying the data. All right, Daniel,
this has been very interesting, man. So I appreciate you kind of filling us in on your
selection process. And we'll definitely want to do a follow up with you in the future as you
implement all these other visualization tools. And ultimately, you know, get to the brass
tax of show me the money. Yeah, for sure. I want to understand, you know, how business has gone up.
Leave us all with like one piece of advice for anyone listening to this that kind of heard
about your entire process. Like what's one piece of advice you can leave us with?
Put in the time and do the research, right? It's the issue that I have sometimes in our
industry, like we, I think everybody means well, but sometimes there's a lot of noise,
right? You know, one of the things that I always talk about too is, do you remember digital retailing?
I do. Yeah. Yeah, you know, I think we got so caught up with the software
and we totally forgot about process, right? Which was actually the more important part
of digital retailing. So and I feel like with CDPs, that's kind of what's happened.
Everybody just got excited about being able to target, you know, that person who didn't buy a car
from you, but service with you. And now looked at a Hyundai Palisade on your website and I want
to get to that guy, right? So they'll find some, you know, we'll find some vendor as a dealer
to help me get to it. But in essence, it's not about really the activation. It's really
about setting up your data properly. And there, unfortunately, I think isn't a lot of
ability to capitalize on the ability to just send data to a dealership. So I think vendors are less
focused about it. But I think there are vendors who exist currently out there who are more aligned
with kind of what's good for the dealership in the long run, even though it might not sound
as sexy or be the new next shiny thing. So I think that's kind of what, you know, what I would encourage
everyone to focus on is, look, you know, what, what, what is the real objective that we're trying
to get to, which is ownership of data, because that is what's going to help
your dealership win in the future. And find the right vendors if you don't have internal
capabilities. And, and, you know, I'll say there are other dealerships out there like
Chomp, for example, right, they've, they've got a huge team, you know, and it's amazing that they
were able to implement it and kudos to them. But, you know, we're, you know, we're not there. A
lot of dealerships don't have that capability. And if that's, if you're in that kind of boat,
then really finding the right partners to be able to implement some of the things you need
to do, I think is what's most important. Well said. Daniel Kambarns crossing auto group.
Daniel, thanks for joining us on the podcast. It's been awesome. All right. Thank you, Yossi.
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
Daniel Kim, Director of Operations at Barnes Crossing Auto Group, shares insights on the integration of AI in automotive dealerships, discussing its benefits and challenges. He emphasizes the importance of data ownership and the implementation of AI agents in the BDC to enhance lead management and customer engagement. Daniel also reflects on his journey from tech entrepreneur to dealership operations, highlighting the need for effective vendor partnerships and the significance of a robust data strategy. His experiences reveal the evolving landscape of dealership technology and the critical role of data in driving sales.
Original notes
Today I’m joined by Daniel Kim, Director of Operations at Barnes Crossing Auto Group. His journey from tech entrepreneur to dealership operations leader, the promises and pitfalls of AI BDCs, why he insists his team stay on the phones and much more.
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Topics:
01:00 How did upbringing shape Daniel?
04:01 Why enter the auto industry?
05:41 Founding Orbi: biggest early challenges?
08:09 Current role and responsibilities?
10:38 AI implementation challenges in auto?
16:03 Vendor selection process tips?
21:42 AI in BDC: results?
24:01 AI's role in dealership operations?
41:34 Best AI/data advice for dealers?
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