“An Army of Experts!” – The End of Software as We Know It + Reacting to Live Dealer Comments | Pre-NADA AI #7

Who is Eric Rea and why is he back on the show?

Yossi Levi: 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 a BDC agent, not just a service adviser agent. You should plan on having an army of experts, because that's how we feel right now in engineering and product at Podium. In part seven, our final installment of the Pre-NADA AI 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, Ikon Technologies, and of course, Podium. And now, let's get into the show. Eric Rea on the CDG podcast. Eric, welcome back.

Eric Rea: Hey, thanks for having me, Yossi.

Yossi: Great to have you back on, Eric. I'm gonna jump right back into our conversation, which was so good that I wanted to start recording. And here we are.

How is AI changing dealerships?

Yossi: So, we were basically talking about the pace of change right now that's happening technologically in our industry and in general tech. You're obviously running a tech company — I stay very close to it because it impacts this industry so greatly, and other things, I'm just generally interested in it. Fun fact: a community member within Circles, our dealer peer group, set up an impromptu AI and vibe-coding live session. This was a Zoom call. This person in our community said, "Hey, I want to set this up, I think we could have a good conversation." And there were tons of signups — I don't have the exact number, but a lot of dealers signed up for this, which surprised me initially. I thought, these are dealers who aren't necessarily in the tech industry. Obviously they have a lot of technology in their dealerships, but they're carving out an hour of their day to attend this AI and vibe-coding session within Circles, which was led by a guy named Jason Mayhew — shout out to Jason for doing this. I'm sharing this context as a way to lead into a broader conversation I wanted to have with you to kick off this podcast, which is: what the hell is happening right now? The pace of technology and innovation is mindboggling, it's almost hard to keep up with. I want to start with that — tell me a little bit about your take on the current market environment.

Eric: Yeah, so we serve dealerships, but we are a software company, and this is what's great that's happening right now. We're waking up and realizing — well, we've known this for a long time — no dealer even cares about software. That's the main thing we're understanding: software has been a necessary evil for a long time. I bet most dealers have too much of it in their dealership. What's happening for us in our industry — I think it's going to reflect in auto in the near future — is that we have engineers now that do not write code. 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 who work just as long, but they use agents and don't write code themselves — they're orchestrating multiple agents to do the work for them, and in some cases they can produce ten times as much product as they could two years ago. So that's what we're seeing in our industry. 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 do we even need more software? I don't know. We definitely need better software. But 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 a BDC agent, not just a service adviser agent. You should plan on having an army of experts, because that's how we feel right now in engineering and product at Podium.

What are the software challenges in dealerships?

Yossi: Wow, okay. So you wrote a thread on X — formerly Twitter — a couple weeks ago. I read this thread, it was very interesting. For anyone listening, you should follow Eric on X. You mentioned hitting a hundred million dollars in AI ARR — in other words, for anyone not familiar with the term, that's revenue in your company being generated from AI products. You said something very interesting in this post: that when you were going through this entire process as a company — you build software for dealers and other businesses, but dealers primarily — you basically identified that dealers didn't care about more software, nor did they need it. The real constraint was people; that was the pinch point. Can you tell us a little bit about what that process was like for you, going through and understanding that dealers have a staffing issue — that's what they need help with — and how you solved that, or solved historically that?

Eric: Yeah, so we've been around for twelve years. We've been a software company from day one. My co-founder and I built the original product in two weeks and started selling it door-to-door. For the past twenty years, software's been such a great business because it's so much better than pen and paper. Cloud software is so much better than on-prem. There have been these tailwinds in the entire software industry — ours included — where if you could build good software, because it was difficult to build, and you could get into the market and have good go-to-market, you could be pretty successful. But the interesting thing is that software was only as good as the people behind it. The way we think about it: all the software that's been written up until two years ago relied on people to be valuable. What happens, though, if you run a dealership and you're at a three-and-a-half percent net margin? You don't have the people to use the software, so it's not that valuable. What we're seeing is the real thing people want — they don't want another freaking piece of software to log into. They want to augment labor, to grow their business and run the operations of their dealership. That's it. So we need to stop thinking that we're so cool because we're a software company, and start focusing on labor replacement. Nobody's firing anyone, because if you look at a dealer, they don't have enough people to begin with — there's just so much to do there. We just have to stop thinking that software is cool. It's not. Helping people grow their business is cool.

Yossi: Yeah, it's not a zero-sum game — I agree with you, it's definitely positive-sum. And to your point, I subscribe to this thesis that everyone has been chronically understaffed in some capacity. If that wasn't the case, 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 wasn't a year ago, but almost a year ago — what has changed from what I should expect as a dealer, and what AI can do for me today at the dealership? What has changed in the last sixty days with respect to Podium specifically?

How is AI added to dealerships?

Eric: Yeah, so for Podium, 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 idea that you have an army of experts that are there to help you run your dealership — not just, "I've got an agent for this, I've got an agent for that," and they don't talk to each other and they just do this standalone thing. The other thing I'd say that's 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 — schedule a test drive, schedule a service appointment, give somebody an update on their vehicle in the service drive. If I'm a dealer principal 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 thirty seconds, day or night, but it only gets ten percent of the way through the process of scheduling the test drive or whatever it is. That's not that helpful — that's a glorified answering service. We've tried to do this from the beginning, and the technology has only made it more possible to do. You should be expecting an agent today — and "AI agent" sucks too, it's a bad name — but you should expect that if you buy AI, or buy labor replacement, whatever you want to call it, it does the job of a person. If it doesn't, you're wasting your money, because you still have to have a person on the other side.

Yossi: Is it basically —

Eric: I think we're leaving the era of experimental AI. That's gone. Now I think the rubber meets the road: is this saving me money, is this making me money? If neither of those two things are true, what am I paying for?

Yossi: Mhm. From a business perspective, many dealers I speak with are being pitched multiple times a week by different providers. Let me pretend I'm a fly on the wall right now in your boardroom, and you're sitting with your board, your executive team, whoever, and you're thinking about how to future-proof your business. Things are going great right now — margins are good, business is good — but there are all these other funded companies trying to come behind you and take your market share, take your business. What can you do to future-proof your business, and from the perspective of a dealer, 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 how you build that system for the dealer so it's the best offering for them in the market and they don't want to go somewhere else. What do you build for the dealer to make it so easy that they don't leave or go anywhere else?

Why is “set it and forget it” AI a red flag?

Eric: Yeah, I'd say two things. Number one, if somebody's telling you it's set-it-and-forget-it, I would run — don't walk, run — away from that vendor.

Yossi: So it's not set it and forget it.

Eric: No. How could it be? You're replacing a human. It's a very nice thing to say in a sales demo, and I'm sure it closes a lot of deals because it's a nice thought, but it's the same as back in the day when you had these third-party lead companies that said, "Oh yeah, we'll answer your phone and we'll do the BDC work." It's a nice thought that you can just outsource that to somebody and they take care of it and do a great job, but in reality it was never the case. So the number one thing is, if people are saying it's set-and-forget, it's just not — because it's replacing human labor, and that's really difficult. We're going on-site ten to twenty times more than we ever have in the history of the company, and we take on the responsibility of making sure we train Jerry to your dealership, because there are literally thousands of things an individual dealer is going to want to adjust with an agent for any given use case. So that's number one.

What are real dealers saying about Podium right now?

Yossi: Well said. Okay, so the reason I'm smiling is because I just went into Circles, our dealer peer group — I like to do this, this is the market-research part of the conversation — and I searched "Podium." Let's see what real dealers have said over the past thirty days about Podium. It could be comments, questions, feedback, I don't know. Okay, one dealer said, "Really considering Podium's Jerry for our website chat tool, and checking out their voice AI option." So — I don't think you did voice AI last time we spoke. Is that new?

Eric: Yeah, we launched that in the last three months — brand new product, brand new channel, and it's the most important channel in the dealership.

Yossi: 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 Tekion CRM and just onboarded Podium AI" — he said they're starting voice AI. This was just now, so maybe he wasn't aware of it. I guess he's saying he's on Tekion CRM — so you obviously integrate with all the DMSs 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 search themselves and see that this is totally real. How do you think about integrating, as I'm going through more comments? There are so many bolt-on solutions today in the market, and like you said, dealers have too much software. How do you make that part easy — the integration with other systems?

How does Podium handle integrating with CRMs and DMS systems?

Eric: Yeah, it's necessary and challenging. Back in the day, when we were just doing web chat or the reviews product, the integration was simple — send us the file of people that bought a car, we'll send out this message, or 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, the CRM, the service platform, and it's super complicated. You want these AI agents, these AI employees, to act like a human and do human work — you've got to give them access to all the systems and information like a human, and it's been a massive challenge. We built an entire product at Podium called Watchtower, and it basically monitors every integration we have, all the time, twenty-four-seven, to make sure it's working — because these integrations break, the data feeds break, and we don't want our customers calling us telling us that Jerry doesn't have access to the inventory or whatever it is. So we built this whole product just to make sure these integrations work. I think the interesting thing is, as AI becomes more and more capable, the need for really good data integration and workflow integration is not going to slow down. I don't know where it goes.

Yossi: I agree. So when you say this needs a lot of customization — who's doing this work at the dealership, and what does the graph look like? Do I do a lot of it up front and then it tapers off quickly, or is it the GM, the BDC manager? Who's doing this work?

How does AI Studio train Jerry for each dealership?

Eric: So we see a lot of BDC manager, GSM, even general manager. I think — if I were in my Podium sales mode right now — this is the one thing that drastically differentiates us from most of the other players out there: we have a thing called AI Studio, and that has all of these agents built into it — a trainer agent, a planner agent, all these things. AI Studio is where you go to train Jerry, to give it new skills, to give it playbooks. There's an easy way for me to actually build the process here, so I can add this AI employee to my — let me run you through what a typical onboarding experience is like. You sign up, we do a kickoff call immediately, we get all the integrations set up, and then we go through and work with you to build. We feel like Jerry is eighty percent good enough out of the box, because everybody's selling cars, they want to do it differently, but the businesses are similar. Then there's that twenty percent more — custom playbooks, custom instructions — that fill in. So the onboarding is, we start with Jerry eighty 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 how you want things done. How do you want people to schedule test drives? How do you want people to handle service appointments? There's all this stuff, and so we do that — and then we're not done, because over the next sixty days you're in there, and the nice thing about AI Studio is you can do test runs, which is simulating very typical conversations in sales or service, and you can see how Jerry is going to respond to these very common test-run conversations. What we see is that over sixty days you get Jerry to a really good spot, but then the cool thing is you can give Jerry new skills — you can decide Jerry is going to have a skill of talking about vehicle buybacks, or leases that are out, whatever the skill is, and you can target it for what's relevant to you. The nice thing is, any conversation, any interaction Jerry has had with any customer, we have the ability inside Podium — you click on it, say "give feedback," type out your feedback in plain English, and our trainer agent in AI Studio takes that and adjusts the playbooks and instructions for Jerry so that, moving forward, it does what you want.

What more are dealers saying about Podium?

Yossi: Let's read a couple more — this is fun. I'm just going in order, so I'm still on about three days ago or something. Someone said they're looking for a tool with the ability to upload a customer list and market to it through email and text — this is a Ford dealer. Someone responded, "Podium may have some capability there, we haven't used it ourselves, but our rep spoke about it." Do you — that sounds to me like table stakes.

Eric: Correct. Yeah.

Yossi: Yeah. Someone said, "We've used Podium, they've been a great partner" — so good for you. I'm trying — I've got to find a spicy one too. Find somebody that's pissed off, I know they're out there. All right, well — after this one. He wrote, "Good timing, I just" — he said, "I just set up automated follow-ups for AI text with Jerry." He said, "We don't have any CRM integration yet," he said it's his fault, but "you do have a text conversation." Again, I don't want to give away who the dealer is, so I'm trying to keep it anonymous. All right, let's see — someone that is not happy. This next one said, "I love Podium's AI tool, Jerry. He uses the text widget on our website, we get a ton of engagement. He handles the conversations very well." Okay, so this one isn't that spicy, but this person said he uses Podium only with after-hours leads, because his team, and I quote, "doesn't have the heart or commitment" — oh, no — I think he's saying he doesn't want to force his team to do it after hours, so he only uses Podium for after hours, which is interesting — he's not using it during the day. No BS, people are saying good things, so good for you.

Eric: I send a personal email to every — I mean, we have sixty thousand, probably closer to seventy thousand customers now — and I send a personal email to all of them after they're about fifteen days into onboarding, because that's when things could start to go wrong. I get a lot of people who say, "This is great, we love it," and then I get people — it's awesome, because I get these personal emails every day from customers who say, "Hey, it's not going well, here's why," and we have a channel where we immediately attack those problems and solve them. So I know there are detractors out there, but —

Yossi: Oh, okay — so, sorry. I actually do have one here. I'll give you this in summary: this person is basically thinking of replacing Podium with a more comprehensive CRM. What do you think about that? Doesn't Podium add new features on top of my CRM? Or is there a CRM out there that does something similar to what Podium already does?

Is Podium worried about being replaced by a full CRM?

Eric: Yeah, I mean, there are obviously CRMs that have some AI capability, CRMs that do texting and communication. I don't know what this customer is using — my best guess would be that they maybe aren't using our AI, but they're using us for web chat and communication, and they might be moving to consolidate on their CRM. The way I see things, a year from now — 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 software was better than if they were trying to use whatever's built into their CRM or DMS. We're 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 that all software is really good. My focus is to build the best agents, because the agents are what actually produce value now. It's not — people, in two years, are not going to be very excited about some software they have to log into and click around and do things for themselves.

What is the future of AI?

Yossi: Yeah, it's like, why would I do that? Even at Podium, we don't want to buy another software.

Eric: Nope. The best thing I saw on Twitter was, every piece of software is just an obstacle to you getting what you want. Everything — when I click on my phone and I click on Uber, I just want the car to show up. I have to go through these clicks and stuff, and as that gets eliminated, things get quicker for everyone. Now put that in a business case: I'm at the service drive, 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 in my operation.

Why is speed the ultimate competitive advantage?

Yossi: Here's one more — again, not that spicy, but it shows maybe some awareness. This dealer is basically saying, verbatim, that a large portion of his sales are out of state, and he's saying that Jerry, the AI bot, is responding by first 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 he can just control that and change it.

Eric: Yeah. What we're most — it's interesting, because —

Yossi: You're such a founder, you're like, "Let's go, let's go."

Eric: Well, I love it, because I think this is the key to almost any business. I've only been doing this for twelve years, so there's probably some dealer principal who's going to listen to this and say, "You don't know what you're talking about." But what I've found is, being fast is the number one competitive advantage. It always has been, and it now is the case even more than at any time in history, because of AI. 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 you can't just build one agent for auto dealers for BDC and then create a bunch of toggles that are the only customization you can do. A year and a half ago, you wouldn't have been able to tell Jerry, "Hey, we have a lot of out-of-state customers, be sure to ask them if they're in-state or not before scheduling an appointment" — that would have had to go to our engineering team to update your specific agent. Now you can.

Yossi: That's a great use case. I like that one.

Eric: Yeah, well, that's the thing — it's not hard for a human to think that. Hey, this lead comes in, I should make sure they actually live close to our dealership before I schedule the test drive. But AI — the challenge of AI is you're kind of teaching it like it's a brand-new person.

What ROI should dealers expect from Podium?

Yossi: Eric, what type of ROI are you targeting for dealers when your sales team is on the field and showing them the whole presentation, a demo? What's the ROI that they tend to expect, or that you're promising?

Eric: Yeah, so a huge uplift in scheduled test drives, huge uplift in scheduled service appointments. On the service side, where we've launched our offering there, it's making sure things do not fall through the cracks. As I've learned more about fixed operations at these dealerships, the service advisor is the most difficult job in the dealer — I don't care what anybody else says. I've been in service, I hated service. It's like — there's this I Love Lucy clip, from the fifties, black and white, where she and her friend are at a chocolate factory trying to package up chocolates, and it just keeps going faster and the chocolates start going everywhere. I feel like that's the day in the life of a service adviser. So we want to make sure nothing slips through the cracks in service, that you're always staying up to date — because the two things people call in for service about are, "I want to schedule an appointment," or "I want an update on my car that's in the service drive." We're helping make sure everybody gets an appointment booked no matter what time or what way they contact you, and when their car is in the service drive, we make sure nothing slips through the cracks, because these things escalate to the service manager no matter what — either escalating when somebody's furious because they didn't get an update on their car until five-thirty p.m. when they found out it wasn't going to be done that day, or it's getting escalated by Podium ahead of time, because the service adviser — 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 forty-five minutes, the service adviser hasn't done anything, you should step in."

How does voice AI help service?

Yossi: Well, on the topic of voice AI, which is related to that — how do you stack-rank there? There are companies that do nothing but voice AI, and in some cases they've been around for much longer, putting a hundred percent of their daily brainpower into perfecting this one specific problem within dealerships. How can you be competitive with that? What's your strategy?

Eric: Yeah, so first of all, we have a big team working on it — our brightest engineers in the whole company. Our first engineer we ever hired works on that product, and he's the smartest engineer we have — we were really lucky, our first hire was a buddy of mine from my computer science program at school, and I knew he was a genius. It turns out he's one of the best software engineers out there, and he's just cranking out code. I'd put our voice AI against any AI product out there, and the interesting thing is there's a lot you can do right now to make it as good as possible — latency, end-of-utterance detection, all these things, we're working on all of that. Having access to information matters too, because what happens is a customer calls in, says something, and as soon as they're done, the model has to detect that they've ended the sentence, and then it sends it to an LLM to act on it, and you want to respond within about two seconds. What we've started doing is, we'll take the first half of the sentence and predict with high accuracy what they're talking about, and start fetching the information we need before they even finish the sentence — and if it turns out we were wrong —

Yossi: Oh, I see what you're saying — so you're shortening the time to response by —

Eric: Yeah, because — here's an interesting thing, and it's really, really difficult. What I'd say will improve this over time most is the large language models for voice specifically — the real-time voice models getting better, which no company that offers voice AI for car dealerships is working on their own large language model for real-time voice. So we kind of just have to wait — these will get really good when those models get better, but that's not something we control. That's OpenAI, Anthropic, and so on.

What's next for Podium at NADA 2026?

Yossi: I also found another comment interesting — this is on your post on X — someone was talking about how you essentially have a distribution moat. You've been working with thousands of dealers for many years, and that enables you to scale this quickly because you've already built that trust — you have the client, and if you can scale it quicker, economies of scale, you can invest in the product more, which makes it better for the dealer. I think the boldest take is that the first ten years of your business were actually just an accumulation of customers, waiting for this moment — kind of like how the internet was built so that we could have AI. A little philosophical, but I like that framing.

Eric: Yeah, and I think we're lucky too, because — if you built a CRM three years ago, or were endeavoring to build a CRM five years ago to replace the existing incumbents, it was bad timing, because that was before AI. So you have this product and it's probably better than the incumbents, but how much better is it — twenty percent? Versus today, you build a system of agents that eventually replaces the CRM, and that might be five to ten times better than the traditional CRM software. So I think it's really interesting — again, it's 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, the rest takes care of itself. But yeah, I do think there's something there. We're lucky that we stayed as a layer of software that sat on top of the big CRMs and DMSs for a long time, because now we don't have an innovator's dilemma — we don't have to destroy anything, and we don't have the technical debt.

Yossi: And the tools you built — the communication tools, all the interaction products, the web chat — they're the perfect tools an AI employee can use to do its job.

Eric: Yeah.

Yossi: You basically built the front end, and now you're doing the back end. It's great. So, what's your plan for NADA? I know you're going to be there, I'm going to be there — what's your plan there?

Eric: Well, we're going to go sell the crap out of our new agents for service. And the funny thing is, we talked to a top-four dealer group two months ago, and the CTO had never heard of Podium — wild. A third of dealers in the US use Podium, they're paying us right now for Podium in some shape or form, and the CTO at a 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 we're going to do a lot more at NADA — that's why I'm coming on here as much as you'll have me. We just need to get the word out, because when people use our product, we find they don't cancel it, which is pretty rare with AI — there's a lot of churn in AI products. So that's the plan for NADA. I might try to golf with one of our customers, and then we're going to do that golden nights game with you, which will be awesome.

Yossi: Amazing.

What are the three big priorities for Podium's service AI?

Yossi: Eric, is there anything I didn't ask you that I should have? Is there anything lurking in the back of your mind that you're working on that you want to share with everyone listening right now?

Eric: In service, the three big things we're doing — and this is kind of a preview of what you'll hear if you come talk to us at NADA — first of all, voice AI to schedule appointments through, and also via text. Anytime somebody reaches out and wants to schedule service, we do it — we don't care how: voice, voice-to-text, text, or we send them a link. All we're trying to do is make sure everybody who wants to book a service appointment with you books it, and we make it as easy as possible. So that's number one. Number two — this is the other half of calls that come into a service department — what is the update on my vehicle? That's the hardest part of the job, because your service adviser is dealing with the people right in front of them but also getting all these calls, and that's where things start to slip through the cracks. We've built basically the perfect executive assistant for every service adviser in a dealership. So you call in — your F-150 is on the service drive — you call in, if the service adviser can't answer, our executive assistant answers the phone: "Hey, how's it going? I know you've got your F-150 in with us right now, you're working with Eric, the service adviser — he's not available right now, but I can take a note and get things started. What can I do for you?" And then you tell it, "I want to know the update on my vehicle, am I going to be able to pick it up today," whatever it is — we take that down and surface it to the service adviser. Ideally we don't even need to involve the service adviser, but there are some things the systems don't tell us today about the status of these vehicles, so we're surfacing it to the service adviser so it doesn't slip through the cracks. If it does — because these guys are the busiest guys in the dealership — we have an escalation feature in Podium for both sales and service, and we escalate: if you're a service manager, you decide when you want this escalated up the chain after a certain amount of time, and we take care of it. That's the second thing we're doing, and it's giving your service advisors superpowers so they can do their job much better, because it's the busiest part of the dealership, it's the most profitable, but it's understaffed, and we've got to fix that. Number three is that the amount of revenue potential sitting in a service department is massive, and dealers don't capture it because there aren't enough people — recalls, telematics, tapping into the OEM portal and figuring out who needs to come in right now because the vehicle is telling them there's a problem. All of these areas where we can go do proactive outbound — and this isn't just getting a list and sending a template, because if you take a list and send a template message, that's just automation, not AI. AI is understanding the context of the customer, all the information, crafting a really targeted message, sending it out, and having an agent that's watching — and if they don't follow up, following up again. Because 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 nobody else in the service department has the time to do it, so the AI should do it for you. So those are the three things.

What's Eric's message to dealers watching this?

Yossi: Amazing. Are you excited?

Eric: I don't know, what do you think?

Yossi: I think you're pumped. Twelve years in, you still got that fire in you.

Eric: Yeah, my wife is like, "You're not quitting anytime soon, are you?" I'm like, "No, I've never had more fun in my life doing this job right now." But the last thing I'd say is, if you're a dealer principal or a GSM or whatever, and you've heard the AI pitch, you've used it and you've either liked it or not — this stuff's coming. We see it in our business right now having massive impact, it's real. Software engineering — the reason they make so much money is because it's one of the most sought-after, difficult-to-attain skills out there, and if it can help software engineers do their job and they don't write a line of code and they're ten times more productive — my point to everybody out there in the dealer world is, you should expect, in the near future, hopefully it's Podium bringing this to you, an army of experts helping you grow your dealership and take advantage of all the revenue opportunities that exist — whether that's the fifty to eighty percent of leads in your system that don't get worked because you only work the top twenty percent, or this massive opportunity in the service department for telematics and warranty and all these opportunities you're just not pulling in because you don't have the manpower.

Yossi: Amazing work, Eric, thank you so much for the update. This was fun — it was also fun to bring up random feedback from the audience, it's always interesting to keep it that way. I'm looking forward to seeing you at NADA. We'll put your booth information in the show notes below as well — if anyone wants to come visit you, come take a look. Your passion, everyone can sense that, and you're doing some great things for the industry. Eric, thanks so much for coming on, and I'm sure we'll have another conversation very soon. Thanks, Eric.

Eric: Thanks, Yossi.

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.