Meet The Secret Agent Running This Dealer's Operations

Who are tonight's guests, and how did John end up running a dealership?

Sam D'Arc: Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Car Dealership Guy Industry Spotlight podcast. I'm your host, Sam D'Arc, and coming up today: AI agents are already helping dealership teams work faster and smarter. But who's helping the dealer principal, the GM, or the operator manage an increasingly impossible workload? Enter the AI operator agent. Joining me today are John Keohane of Temecula Valley Buick GMC and Liam Golightley of Podium to explain why AI for operators may be the next big advantage in retail automotive. Thanks to Podium for supporting today's content. Now, let's get into it. So, John, welcome to the Car Dealership Guy podcast.

John Keohane: Thank you very much. Happy to be here.

Sam: So, John, for those who don't know you, tell us a little about yourself. Where are you? What kind of vehicles do you sell? What does your volume look like at your store?

John: We're located in Temecula, which is in the Inland Empire in Southern California, kind of directly between Los Angeles and San Diego. We're a Buick GMC dealer, and volume hovers around 150 to 160 total.

Sam: Oh, wow.

John: 110 to 120 of that being new.

Sam: Wow, so you weigh out heavily on new versus used. What do you attribute that to? That's enormous, that's a big difference.

John: The product's been fantastic, and the market in and around Southern California, the GMC brand has been phenomenal, and we earn the right trucks. There seems to be a relatively large appetite for high-trim Yukons, half-tons, and three-quarter tons.

Sam: So you're part owner in this. How did you get into this business? I detect a Canadian accent. Is this true?

John: Yeah, I'm from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. I started in the car business when I was going to university. It was a really good summer job selling cars because I had a good friend whose dad owned a couple of stores. I liked it quite a bit. I went and finished my university, got a CPA designation at KPMG, and didn't want to do that for very long, so I went back to work for that group. I did that for a number of years, and then my in-laws, who were not in the car business, had moved down here and had an opportunity to purchase this location, and asked if I would come help them.

Sam: Wait, how did you convince your in-laws to buy a dealership when they weren't in the car business? That's going to be a story in and of itself. Did they talk you into it, or did you talk them into it?

John: I didn't do any convincing. It was a summer in Edmonton. We weren't married yet, but we'd been together a long time, and her father texted me and shared some pro forma financials, and I said I think that's a good idea, and here we are.

Sam: Wow. And what have you attributed most to your success in a dealership, since it was new to both sides, you and them, in the business? What do you attribute to your success?

John: The people here are fantastic. Honestly, in my experience at the automotive group in Canada, attrition was high. It's a high-performance, high-turnover industry, but I could count on one hand the number of key people who've actually turned over at this location. We purchased the location just prior to the world shutting down in November of 2019, so we rode it through what we thought was going to be a real low period, and it turned out to be the best two years in the car industry.

Sam: Yeah.

John: Forever, which you know better than I do.

Sam: Which will never happen again. It's not coming back.

John: No, that's what everyone keeps saying. Everyone points to the same graph, six and a half percent instead of one and a half, two and a half. But the people are fantastic, the product's been good, and our partnership with our OEM has actually been fantastic as well.

Sam: So it's interesting, you have a CPA background, so you have a very logical mind. You even showed that a little as you were thinking through the numbers in your head, what makes something profitable and what doesn't. Talk to me about a CPA-background dealer running a car dealership today in 2026. What are some of the areas of focus, and some of the biggest challenges?

Why do CPA-minded operators get buried in reports they never act on?

John: The biggest challenge is that you think you can report your way out of anything. In my previous job, it was a gigantic group. You had all the reporting tools you could ever need, and people who would give you reports, discuss ideas, and then go execute. One of my failures is that I try to keep everything under wraps. I think I can do more than I can. And I think a lot of single-rooftop operators without big teams find themselves in the same spot, where you have all this information that the vendors give you, your DMS gives you, and there's an infinite number of things you could execute on. You think about them, and then your day gets busy and you don't.

Sam: And so it's great, "that's a fantastic report, Mr. Vendor, I've been looking at the same thing for three months and haven't done anything about it."

John: That was a limitation that I found.

Sam: You know, it's interesting, because we all get so many vendor reports. We get so many data points, and many of them are interesting.

John: A lot of them are actionable.

Sam: Yes. But what's the separator between interesting, actionable, and what you actually take action on? How do you decide what to act on? Because I see tons of data points, you can do a lot of things, but you can't do everything. You can only do some things.

Why is the BDC function the lowest-hanging fruit for automation?

John: I guess the answer is you've got to have someone you trust to execute on it. What I've found, particularly with the sales and service outbound function, what's called the BDC function, is that so much of it requires training, execution, review, feedback. My belief, and I might be wrong, is that a lot of that stuff is low-hanging fruit for what technology can do. We're prompting the customer to do something they already know they need to do on the service side. I don't believe anymore that it requires a lot of human decision-making. You just need to turn on the cannon, for lack of a better term. That's what I've been trying to do on our fixed-ops side. Okay, I've got all this information, I've been staring at these reports. The technology has been so good for, I don't know, the last 15 years, that you have this opportunity pointed right in front of you, saying, "Hey, if you do a good job on this, here's your ROI." So, okay, I've got to go find someone to do it, because everyone's super busy and I've got to line it up.

Sam: And you can't afford to hire everybody, right? Because that takes time, training, and developing.

John: Teaching them how to deal with it, right.

Sam: Yeah. And what does execution look like? Like, what do I think is a good job on this? Okay, well, maybe I can have a process that's automated that then lets me know if it's doing a good job. So the purpose of this show today is to talk a little about almost a secret agent that you have, which you've been piloting over the past four to six months as a busy dealer, a busy operator. The secret agent is called operator. We're going to get into that in just a minute. But give us some of the tension points in your world, where you're overwhelmed with data that could be actionable, that you could take action on, but you haven't been able to, either for lack of time, the right people, or just focus. What are a few of those areas, John?

How did John put Podium to work on his untouched telematics data?

John: The lowest-hanging fruit is what I started talking about with the Podium team as something I thought would be pretty easy to solve. That was on the telematics side. There are turnkey vendors and turnkey relationships you can have with my OEM where this would happen, but I didn't have those relationships. And I liked Podium as a partner, so I thought we could talk about it. The telematics piece is: you've got this PDC portal where you've got a treasure trove of information about a customer.

Sam: The most important piece being their car is telling them they have a problem.

John: So I pointed them at that and said, "Look, your AI agent, for lack of a better term, is a fantastic conversation starter. Give it a set of outcomes you want to achieve, and it will do it. I just need you to go grab the information, process it, and feed it through your system, so I'm having the conversation with my service customer in the same place I might have a conversation with them about a new vehicle in a couple of months."

Sam: So in the old world, before you got this operator agent, what would you do with that telematics data?

John: I built a little scraper tool that I gave to our BDC department. Again, because I didn't think it required a lot of creative thought, it was just if-then, that was the message.

Sam: And then it would scrape all the data and feed it to the BDC, and how many days before someone would get on it and do the outreach?

John: They did a good job, they were doing it. It was 45 to 60 messages a day.

Sam: Yeah.

John: Even 45 to 60 messages a day on a vehicle, on a customer who's had the vehicle for three and a half years, we're not actually reading, responding, digesting, and thinking about how to talk to the customer with all those service records, all the milestones, all the offers, all the recalls that might be there. It necessarily just becomes a message that says, "Hey, come in and check us out for an appointment."

Why did John's old scraper-and-BDC workflow fall short?

Sam: And customers may or may not respond to that. It feels cold, a little like a cold call. You have the telematics, they know.

John: They'll either accept it or they won't. It's dependent on the BDC person to go fill out the notes, create the status follow-up, and write down an outcome. And again, because we live in a world of different portals, that information that lives with the OEM may or may not make it to my CRM, may or may not make it to Podium. So what was happening a lot of the time was a message went out to a customer to come solve their telematics issue, and I'd get a response back that said, "Yeah, I did that already, thank you."

Sam: So enter Liam Golightley, SVP of Customer Success at Podium. Liam, when John calls you up and says, "I want an operator agent, I want a leg up on everyone else out there. Yeah, I can create a scraper tool and give it to my BDC, but they're not going to be uniquely suited like AI might be to engage," what was your response?

Liam Golightley: Yeah, our response was: John's right. We talked to GMs, we talked to owners, and I think John, you said it earlier, there's an infinite number of things that you want to do, and then the TVs go out.

John: Yeah.

What is Podium's operator agent, and why did Podium build it?

Liam: So that's why we created operator. Operator is really the first of our AI employees that is helping you operate your business. It's taking all the things that John wants to do and actually acting on them. It's a little different from our other AI employees. Our other AI employees are talking to the dealership's customers, they're talking about sales, service, voice. This one is the super agent that's helping John actually run.

Sam: A secret agent. It's a 007. It's doing things for John, with his Canadian accent, that no 007 can.

Liam: That's right. And John's one of our incredibly smart, incredibly creative operators. If you can take John and amplify him, if John had a million hours, I'm sure he'd like to read through every single conversation that happened with every one of his customers.

Sam: Like I'm sure most leaders would. This is saying, well, why don't you have an assistant that actually does that? It reads through every single conversation everyone is having in your dealership, and reports back to you as the owner what to do, which is really exciting. All right, so John, you want to know, on these connected-car signals, oil change, flat tire, service, whatever, is this being done, and what are the results of it? Do you have to go to your computer, log in, pull up a big report to see it? Or is there a different way to engage with your secret agent?

John: No, typically, almost 100% of the time, if it's a large task, it will create a dashboard for you, which is really cool. It'll break down what the intent is, what they think the population is.

Sam: And where do you see the dashboard?

John: It'll send it to me. It's a little like talking to one of the LLMs, like ChatGPT. I can talk to it in a Chrome extension, or it will send it to me via SMS text. Candidly, during the day, I'm doing both. I call mine Emily, because we have a Jerry at the store, so I don't want everyone coming to ask for Jerry.

Sam: Yeah, yeah.

How does Emily run John's weekly revival campaigns?

John: She just texted me that she's done with my service-win-back August campaign, so that's her. We'll think of something else to talk about after we're done recording.

Sam: And then Emily, your super agent, goes and does it, and reports back in a particular period of time. Give us another example. So, services that you otherwise would have engaged BDC on to do outreach, that's one example. What's another, John?

John: A good one, and Liam might get upset about this, is that it basically killed bulk SMS for me as a tool I used in Podium. Bulk SMS was great because you could scrape lists or upload lists and say, "Hey, we've got a big sale coming up," but those aren't personalized, it's just, "Hey, blank, come on in." Whereas, because Emily and the sales AI in Podium are ingesting all of my leads and tracking all the conversations, on Wednesday or Thursday of every week I'll run something called a revival campaign, where I'll say, "Go take a peek at my last 45 days of opportunities, go take a peek at my last 45 days of sales, dedupe those, check what I have going on in terms of excess supply in this trim," and revive those opportunities that haven't closed with a warm nudge, a new incentive, or an increased trade appraisal kick, or something along those lines.

What's on Emily's template list, and what do dealers ask for most?

John: That runs every Wednesday or Thursday, on the new-sales-opportunity side. A lot of times it'll come back and say, "Hey, I found 65, 14 of them have had active conversations in the last two days. Normally you don't want to touch people if they're having an active conversation, should I exclude them?" All that kind of verbiage, it really is like talking to a genuinely engaged BDC super-user.

Sam: So, Liam, John reaches out and says, "I've got these two ideas, I want to execute on them." Does Emily come with template tasks she can go do, or does John come up with the different things he wants as an operator and a GM, given the style of his business?

Liam: It's both. We have a bunch of templates we see customers use over and over, but someone like John knows how to run his business better than we do, so he comes up with a bunch of creative use cases. Really, there's no limit on what Emily, in his case, can do. If you have a question like, "Why is my volume down with this type of lead? Why am I not converting this type of lead?" Think of it like a super-intelligence that reads everything and comes up with ideas, like a sparring partner, an analyst for you to think through your business. But we also have templates. A lot of folks are using it to coach their employees. That's one of the common things we see.

How does Emily help John catch near-miss sales before they slip away?

Sam: What's the number one or number two top template that you're asking the super-agent, as an operator, to go do?

Liam: I think the first thing is just making sure nothing is slipping through the cracks. I have a lot of GMs and owners say, "Every day I want you to message me, where has my team not responded to a customer, or where is there a customer who's really close to buying that I should step in on?" That goes back to: if there were a thousand Johns, he'd like to be in every single conversation, saying, "Whoa, this one's close, I'm not going to let this go." It's impossible for John to do now. So that's a really big one, every day, text me where the next likely sale is that I'm missing.

Sam: Have you asked Emily that today, where's the sale I'm missing?

John: Yeah, she texts me that every morning, basically the previous day's business, what's ongoing, if she feels like someone needs a nudge. A really good example would be a hot-ticket item, call it a diesel Yukon in a certain color. I could say, "Hey, we just had five of these dropped off at my PDI location," and she'll go surface people with active conversations in the last 60 days who were looking for that specific trim.

Sam: Because you can leave a note in a CRM, but someone has to read the note and act on it.

John: And we have really terrific salespeople. The one thing I'll say is that the feedback, having an agent like this scrape your conversations and report back to you, you actually end up more pleased with your team than you'd think. We have really good people who work really hard and want to do a great job for the customer, so identifying the gaps just lets them do their job better. It's not, "Hey, you totally ignored this person," it's, "You didn't know this piece of information. You don't get the emails from the shipping company when it gets dropped off." It's not your fault, but I know it, Emily knows it. Let's nudge the customer.

Sam: So does that assistance or coaching give your people even more confidence? What does the coaching actually look like?

How has Emily turned into friendly competition on the sales floor?

John: What it makes them is competitive. When you've got an AI salesperson scanning every chat in your standard AI employee in Podium, and then you have AI that can see, I don't know if the UI is going to change, that's up to Liam, but they can see when I run a revival campaign or something like that, because in this one inbox, operator will send a message and close it very quickly. They can see that I'm firing away, and they'll say, "Oh, John's at it again." There's been a bit of a philosophical debate, well, it's not really a debate, because I'm going to win, since they have to deal with it.

Sam: That's right, you're the owner.

John: Liam's boss brought this up at another event we were at. I don't unassign the AI agent from any conversation. They're always in. My salespeople have got five minutes to beat the AI agent with a compelling outreach, to make sure Emily doesn't respond first, and then Emily will tell me, as an operator, whether those responses are meeting the four non-negotiables around what an outreach should be.

Sam: And what are the four non-negotiables you trained?

John: A warm greeting. Compelling information about the vehicle, including a video of it if there is one. If there isn't, at least a stock number, or event, or a link to a VDP of something they might be interested in. An invitation to the store. And some compelling piece of incentive, whether it's a trade-in offer, a thousand bucks for the weekend, or some incentive that changed that week. Those are the four things that need to make it in there, and they're really quick at it.

How are John's salespeople using AI to beat Emily to the punch?

John: And I've noticed, and this is probably a problem for operators around the country, my guys are using AI to beat my AI, because I know Andrew can't type that quickly, and he's getting those four elements with the VDP sent out.

Sam: A huge percentage of the time.

John: Yeah.

Sam: All right, so let's back up a little. One of the biggest challenges in automotive is we have so many disparate systems that don't talk to each other. It drives me nuts, logging into this, logging into that. If you're going to have a super-agent like Emily as your operator agent, how does that work? This might be a question for Liam, what type of access does Emily need, and is she able to look at the entire operation, the entire business, to help shape this?

What access does Emily need to see the whole operation?

Liam: Emily's going to have access to everything Podium has access to. If it's integrated with your DMS, all the data is coming from there. If it's integrated with your CRM, all the data is coming from there. Obviously, all the conversations are coming into Podium. What I think is actually crazy that no one thinks about: if you think about your current data, it's very rigid. It's like, "Liam bought a car five years ago, Liam has a red car." What operator is doing is it absorbs every detail of every conversation you have. So if you think about the information in a conversation, let's say, Sam, you're talking to a dealer, it ingests that whole context: "Oh, your family used to have this car, you used to do this, you used to do that." It's no longer little tidbits of data you're trying to piece together. It's the full conversational context, which is remarkable when you think about the level of that.

Sam: Which creates, I'd imagine, when we're seeking to connect with a customer, probably delight that they're being so personally served. Fair. John, have you gotten reactions of delight and amazement from customers who are surprised that you know as much as you do, and are able to speak to them as personally as you do?

John: Yes, particularly on what I call bulk email campaigns. Just being able to ingest that information, in an email format you can put in way more content, talk to them about their car, their history, the four or five different ways you think you can help them out. That's actually been something I really like about using operator, it's unlocked Podium as an email tool for that customer profile of all their activity. There are lots of tools that make that available, and I use those too. The reason I keep falling back on trying to siphon all this through Podium is visibility, it's one inbox.

Sam: What do you mean by siphon it through Podium? Tell me what you mean by that.

Why does running outreach through Podium beat a bolt-on customer data platform?

John: So if you were to use your standard, out-of-the-box customer data platform, I won't use specific examples, but there's a ton of them, you log into a dashboard and there's a treasure trove of, "Hey, you should run this campaign, here's the creative, click it." Wonderful. You log back in the next day, and it'll show you your sends, your open rate, all that stuff. But it lives beneath the surface until a customer raises their hand, then it's in your CRM, in your chat tool, and away you go. If you run it via operator, using Podium as the thing that's actually sending the messages, and it doesn't have to be someone in my chair, it could be a BDC manager, a salesperson, someone at the desk, you can see the messages firing in real time. And when that customer responds, since Podium is the pointy tip of the spear in your sales process, your salespeople recognize that a response in Podium is someone on their phone talking to you, which is the most valuable thing you could possibly have. So any outbound campaign, if there's a response, you're getting people who are incentivized to respond and satisfy their problem as quickly as possible. Whereas with the customer data platforms, you're saying, "We're going to decide what constitutes a hand-raise, then we'll put them into your CRM," and your salesperson has a cold handoff with a new phone number, and away you go. It doesn't mean they're bad, it's just not a hot lead. This is hot, real-time intent.

Sam: For sure.

John: And if I had six more stores, maybe it wouldn't be functional the way I do it, and I'd need some sort of confidence metric for what's a hand-raiser and what should make a new CRM entry. But for my purposes, I can see the messages go through, I can see when they're answered, I can see who's viewing the messages on the sales floor. And I've got the non-operator AI employee handling the intake as well.

Why is now the right moment for an operator-style AI agent?

Sam: John, you've got your hand in every detail of the sales operation without having to be involved in every step of it. Liam, is this what you intended on the Podium side, and why, what has prevented this from happening before now? What makes now the right time for an operator AI tool?

Liam: Yeah, I think there's a couple of things. In terms of why now, everyone's seeing AI get better and better every month, and it's taken a certain level of AI intelligence to actually make this feasible. And yeah, the way John's describing it really is our intention. We hear so many GMs and dealer principals say, "I want to see everything that's going on, but I really can't," whether it's what's happening in conversations, or where a lead is, this close to being closed but needs a little nudge from the GM. That really is the intention with operator, to help make a million Johns, to have his hand in every single part of the dealership, and let him execute, give him a ton of leverage. We think it's really the first glimpse into what operating a dealership is going to look like in the future.

How has this personal agent changed how John's leadership team operates?

Sam: So, John, talk to us about that. Leadership is a big role in any dealership, you're leading teams, people, and you're leading AI agents today in 2026. We talk a lot about that as a role in BDCs. How has having this personal agent changed the way your leadership team works in 2026?

John: What it has done, from the leadership team's perspective, the sales managers, the fixed-ops director, and so on down, is: I think people like Liam, or people like me who like this stuff, are under the impression that everyone knows what these tools are capable of, just because we listen to podcasts like yours. But most people don't, and a lot of people actually have a negative connotation of AI, they've had one bad experience. So the visibility they have into what the tool is doing, because they can see the messages, I'll be sitting right beside my GSM and show him what it's doing, and he'll go, "Oh, that's kind of pretty cool." So I guess the impact on the leadership team is there's visibility into initiatives, and they can actually tie results back to it, they can see when a campaign goes out, they can feel the traffic increase, they can deliver more cars. They feel confident that at least I'm trying everything I can to push as many people into the funnel for them to execute on.

How did Emily spot a customer-pay revenue drop in six seconds?

John: And just before I forget, because this is an example, it actually makes me look bad at my job, which is fine, but it's a really good example of using operator outside of, and I find myself in this trap of everything funneling toward sales, BDC, and outbound. Last month, it felt like we were down on customer-pay in the shop, a consistent drop, May, June, July. My fixed-ops director couldn't really put his finger on it, he was just saying, "We're not that busy, we're not that busy." I asked operator, "Hey, what's going on here? I've been on a steady curve upward, and all of a sudden my CPROs are dropping." And literally in six seconds, and again, shame on me, shame on my advisor, it said, "Oh, well, this customer stopped coming," and it was a large fleet account, a mobile service company that came to service their vehicles on location under warranty, whereas before it was customer-pay. Their decision made sense, and we'll backfill that, but it identified that for me very quickly, without me having to run a CSV or something to figure out why the ROs dropped. Now, should the advisor have said something at some point? Yes, there's a good coaching opportunity there: "Hey, when half your business walks out the door, you should probably put your hand up and tell us, so we can try and throw" something else at it.

Sam: You know, it's so interesting, because you don't have to waste time chasing the data, which may or may not make sense once you scrape it all, you don't have to waste time interrogating it. You can get the insight that's immediately actionable. It occurs to me that in 2026, successful dealer operations are all about speed to execution, and not erroneous execution, but data-fact-based execution.

What's the difference between insights, recommendations, and actions?

Sam: Liam, is that part of the intent, being able to do the story of the lost fleet customer? John could have spent days trying to figure it out, wasted dollars, and instead he got that insight instantly, was able to take action, and move on. There's value in that.

Liam: Yeah, that's right, Sam. When we think about operator, it's insights, pulling all the things you don't have time for, asking all the questions you may have at the top of your mind. It's recommendations, so it's not just, "Hey, I noticed this is down," it's, "Hey, I noticed this is down, here's how you can improve it." And then it's actions, because often it's, "I have all these insights, all these ideas, but I just don't have the time to do it." So that's what we're hoping for from operator: insights, recommendations, and actions.

John: I think something you said that was super useful there is discarding it. It can give you the insights and the information, and you can just not act on it, but it didn't take two and a half hours to put together, I don't have to stand up and go talk to my controller about it, have her pull a report, and then look at it and go, "Okay, this is garbage, I can't do anything with this." It's, "No, okay, that's interesting, but I'm going to discard it and move on," that's actually super useful.

How does a dealer actually stand up an operator agent?

Sam: So, Liam, here's my next question. You've got this tool, created by dealer demand, saying, "I want better operational control, I want insights we don't have today." For a dealer that already has Podium, that has you plugged into their CRM and their DMS, how do you stand up this operator agent? How does a dealer think about it, is it something you just turn on? Is it a capability that gets added?

Liam: It's something we turn on, turn it on, provide a few examples and templates. One of the cool things about operator is the more you're using Podium, the more it can do. If you have our sales AI, it can help with that. If you have sales and service, it helps with that. Sales, service, and voice, it just expands. Like I mentioned before, a lot of it is how much data it has, when it knows all the conversations you're having across all parts of your dealership, suddenly your secret agent has all this access and ability to help. So, yeah, it's pretty exciting.

Sam: It's an interesting tool, because it could really make a GM or a dealer looking to be super-efficient almost seem brilliant, even outside their own ability. John, does it help you punch above your own capability?

John: Well, it wouldn't have to work very hard to do that.

Sam: Oh, come on, you're a CPA.

Where has operator made the biggest difference in John's own blind spots?

John: No, certainly in areas of weakness. For whatever reason, I just never fell in love with outbound service marketing, which is a huge failure, honestly, it's the biggest opportunity I have in my store, and probably most people have in theirs.

Sam: It's the lowest-hanging fruit. It's the customer you can delight and make happy far more easily than selling them a fifteen-thousand-dollar Yukon.

John: But it was just a blind spot in my operation. Rather than try to coach someone to do something I wasn't capable of doing myself, I thought, okay, maybe an AI agent can do it for me. And the results have been great, I think we're up about 12 to 13 percent on customer-pay repair orders this year since we started using it. There's the communication visibility the team has into what customers are telling us, right there, again, you're plugging a good tool into a really good tool in Podium, and you've got the interaction, the notes, the result of that communication. So it's been an easy ramp for me into actually taking my service marketing more seriously.

Does AI level the playing field for a single-point dealer like John?

Sam: So, John, as we wrap up today, you've spent the past four or five months on this. You're in an incredibly competitive marketplace in California, there are few car markets as competitive as California is. Have you started to sense a divide between you, using these tools, leaning into AI technology, getting your team to buy in, and dealers who aren't willing to accept it, who are kind of waiting to see what happens?

John: What I like about tools like this is it's a great equalizer for little me, who doesn't have a data analytics team that a group might have, who doesn't have an integration specialist whose entire job is to make sure all these tools are parsed effectively throughout a large operation. There are no small businesses, but I'm a relatively small business compared to the people I compete with, and I do feel like using these tools keeps me competitive in what's hopefully a cost-effective way, that's up to Liam and those guys. I don't think of it as making me better, I think of it as keeping up with the Joneses, with the guys who have the resources to actually staff and build these tools natively.

What's John's advice for operators still on the fence about AI?

Sam: So, John, as we wrap up, what advice would you give to other VPs of ops, owners, managing partners, or even general managers who are considering implementing AI they may not totally understand, but that stands to give them some benefit and advantage in this incredibly competitive market?

John: Just pick one sore point in your day and feed it into a tool like operator. It doesn't have to be service BDC, it can be lead follow-up, response rate on outbound messages, inventory, "Where am I short here or there?" It's going to give you quick answers, or, probably better yet, and I should take my own advice, put it in the hands of a team member and help it solve a sore point in their day. I think you'll be surprised how easy it is. I joke with my wife that I feel like I spend most of my day just having one robot talk to another. But it does make the difference between analysis and execution, it bridges that gap. I felt like I was spending a lot of time in analysis, reviewing good information, and doing nothing with it.

Sam: So this is doing something with it.

John: Yeah.

Sam: Liam, as AI technology, agentic AI in particular, develops at such an astonishingly fast pace, I don't think this type of secret agent would have been possible a year ago. What would you tell dealers who feel like, "I've listened to so many Car Dealership Guy podcasts, I'm tired of hearing about agentic AI," dealers who are frustrated, who want the advantages AI brings but are just trying to keep up? What advice would you give that dealer, Liam?

Liam: Yeah, the one thing I'd say is we're in this moment, almost like that big Mac computer that was the size of your desk. We're in that moment in AI. If you tried AI two years ago, it's not the same AI. If you tried it three months ago, it's not the same. So I'd say really think about it that way, and think of it as something you want to keep trying and trying. I'd also say customers are increasingly using AI, so it's really important to jump on that. My hope for operator is that it takes brilliant operators like John and amplifies them, so there are fewer things slipping through the cracks, John can have what feels like a team of ten analysts looking through every conversation. It's really just giving John that secret, super weapon.

Sam: Which is an astonishing benefit, again, in today's highly competitive marketplace, that allows a single-point dealer, and you're selling a ton of new cars there at Temecula Valley Buick GMC, a huge advantage compared to much larger rivals. Well, to both of you, John, VP of operations and partner at Temecula Valley Buick GMC, and Liam, SVP of customer success at Podium, thank you both for being on. John, thanks for sharing a little about your secret agent.

John: Thank you, Sam.