The AI-Driven Auto Repair Leader: Using Technology as Your Strategic Thought Partner [RR 1092]

0:00This is the Automotive Repair Podcast Network. Everybody, Carm Capriato, welcome. Remarkable Results Radio, 11 years strong. Today, sitting in the background somewhere is Chris Cloutier, and he is the most perfect person to come on and talk about AI. So I've been thinking a little bit about AI. You know, we've been talking about AI for years, just like we were in DVI, and people just weren't quite sure what they were going to do with DVI.

0:31If you think back a little bit, and then we keep saying, ah, it's not going to be anything, it's going to be obsolete in a short— and I completely disagree with that, and I want you to get that out of your thinking. We're also going to talk about front of house, back of house, recruiting, and production and productivity. AI can help me with that?

0:50Really? You're gonna just love this episode, trust me. And thank you so much to our Sponsors on the podcast. Take your NAPA Autocare Center to the next level with the NAPA Autocare Gold Certified program. Gold Certified shops, well, they stand out. Build trust and enjoy exclusive benefits designed to drive business growth. Contact your NAPA representative today to get started with Gold Certified.

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1:43Hey, welcome back. Don't forget about our app, everyone. For your smartphone, the Ultimate Professional Automotive Repair playlist. Read show notes, watch the videos, link with our sponsor partners, get all the shows in our network. There's the wording, automotiverepairpodcastnetwork.com/app. And thanks to all the guests who've come on over all these 11 years who've contributed to our Automotive Podcast Network shows. I appreciate you giving nature and to help support the industry.

2:16Let me introduce my friend Chris Cloutier. Hello, Chris. Hey, Carm, how are you? I'm great, sir. CEO, founder, autoflow.com and CRM for your auto repair shop. Yeah, and then, uh, proud owner of now a third Golden Rule Auto Care in Dallas, Texas. We just opened up a third shop at the beginning of the year and it's been wildly successful. So yeah, multi-shop owner, auto repair shop extraordinaire.

2:42Uh, sometimes I'm the windshield and sometimes I'm the bug and in a day I'm usually both. And you can understand that, right, Carm? I am truly a serial entrepreneur. We won't even talk about the real estate company that I own on the side, right? Yeah. That's right, Chris. Yeah. Your entrepreneurialism just kind of comes out. It does. Yes. So I wrote to Chris a bit ago and I said, I've been thinking about the power that Amazon and others have in logistics.

3:11You may remember this. I can't imagine the code, the algorithms that They have to decide on delivery, product movement, purchasing, storage, shipping workers, et cetera, et cetera. I'm reading from this. That got me thinking about the future shop flow, workflow from inbound appointments to work assignments to meet promised times, writing algorithms, AI stuff into software. And since you are the cutting-edge person in our industry who thinks about this every minute of the day, I thought of Bayflow and wondered if your software is an integral part of a larger AI algorithm.

3:42And he, I says, come on and do a show. And he goes, okay, I will. But first you gotta read a book. So Chris prepared me for this episode. It's the book called The AI-Driven Leader by Geoff Woods. He talks about having AI be your thought partner and that AI doesn't replace humans, it enhances you. It's not gonna replace you. Your role will evolve with AI.

4:096 of 10 jobs today didn't exist back in 1940. And these are all kind of things from the book. Improve the productivity of your people and goals are too small. Goals are a compass. It's a really comprehensive book. He brings up a lot of great examples and he actually taught me how to talk to AI and get back what my expectations were.

4:30Chris, that's it. And it's a great, I would say, starter guide for a lot of people. And they're like, I hear the term AI. AI, AI, AI. How do I use AI? Where do I apply AI? Oh, I talked to AI the other day and I asked it a question. It gave me the wrong answer. Sure, but at what context did you ask that question, right?

4:49What were the parameters that you gave the machine, the AI, to understand what it is and give you a better answer, right? And in the book, it does a really great job around, like you said, executing and prompting as well as helping you understand as a leader, this can become a strategic partner. So, you know, here I am, you know, joking about I run multiple companies, multiple shops, software company, real estate company.

5:15What I've really experienced is it has become my Jarvis. It has become something that's allowed me to do jobs and do tasks that used to take me a while to do. Now, almost instantly, trust but verify, Carm. I'm not saying I trust the machines wholeheartedly, I'm saying I trust but verify. And the amount of work and the amount of things that I do when it comes to processing spreadsheets, data, a lot of things that leaders do, we're allowing ourselves to exponentially get to our answers quicker and our solutions that much faster.

5:48So I think this book, it should be required reading. Now, I'll give one guy on my team, Scott Smeyer. I had just come back from a conference and it was an AI conference and it just blew my brains about, oh my God, like, what have I been doing?, and then he said, hey, I just read this book, you need to read it.

6:03And pretty much everybody on my team has read it in a leadership capacity on my software team, and it's had a major impact in the way that we're, we're moving into AI. And I appreciate you calling me an expert, Carm. I'm like everybody else. I'm as lost as everybody else, but like you said, I'm constantly consuming it, reading about it, trying to understand about it.

6:23You know, I, once I read the book, It allowed me to have AI become my friend. Let me explain. I had no idea how much it was really knowing about me. And it says, in the vernacular, Carm, of the things that you've said before and where you're taking your company and this or that, let me offer you this. And I'm sitting there saying, what's it?

6:48You mean it actually remembers the stuff that I ask it and the stuff that it writes for me or the stuff that it comes back? For example, I'll take a transcript, Chris, from a discovery call that I have with guests, and I'll take that transcript and I'll feed it up to AI and I'll say, look, I really know what I wanna do here.

7:07You know, Fathom will give me the, the outline, but I wanted AI to give me more of a wonderful, a little bit better structure than I was willing. You're buried, you're busy. Everyone who I'm talking to, the top shop operators are listening to this. Please get this down to the lower tracks for us, please., and we're so busy and crazy. I have been relying on AI to make me more efficient, Chris, and relying on the things that it's telling me back, cuz it's gotten to know who I am.

7:36Without question. And you know, there's a lot of fear around, oh, you know, tell the machines too much cuz they'll— Craig brought this up and Craig's part of your network and, and he brought this up, which was brilliant. He goes, Chris, how long have we been using Google Docs for? And I'm like, man, for 10 years, 12 years, 15. He goes, Yeah, they've already been stealing our data, right?

7:54I mean, all their models are built out because it was free, and it's free, you're the product, right? I'll give you a good example, Carm, of how it saved me in buying this third shop, right? Anybody who's gone through and gone through trying to get an SBA loan, there's a lot of documentation, paperwork that's going to go with it. There's forecasts, projections, all these other things you need to do.

8:11Usually it takes some time. Now, all the financials and stuff, I have a good accountant, so I was able to get that quick. It's— you start getting caught in the minutia of all these little documents you got to provide. Karma, I was able to turn this around in hours. Here's my old projections. Here's, you know, what my current business is doing. Hey, go fill this sheet out that they need for me.

8:28And within a couple of prompts and a couple of different massages here, I had all this information that, Karma, that was going to take me a week. And I know how I work, and I probably work like a lot of entrepreneurs. I'm going to start here, I'm going to work on it, and then, oh, squirrel, I got to go over here. Let me go over here, and then I'm going to go back to it.

8:45And we know that context switches are super expensive anytime we've got to switch from task to task. So it allows you to kind of focus on this thing, get a good result very quickly, and then massage it and then really complete it versus this context switch going back and forth. But I'm telling you, Carm, I saved days and days and days of, you know, paperwork that I would get for this SBA.

9:07Like, you're using it. Here's just, you know, one of 1,000 examples of how you can leverage once again the machines. Thousands. Were you the one who told me that you loaded up some resumes? My funniest story about the resume is that me and Cody, which works for my software company, we had this brilliant idea that we're going to get AI to write all our job descriptions of what we want, which was great.

9:28We fed it. Now here's the thing. What's good about AI? It's as dumb as you want it to be, but it's as smart as you allow it to be. So we loaded it with all the things we wanted and all the criteria and all this. And so we post this job ad.. And then we start getting these really great, you know, resumes, but we start getting flooded with resumes.

9:44So we took— and I'm like, I got this idea, let's take them all and let's put them back to the machine and let the machine go through and grade them. Well, then we start grading them and getting, you know, really good ABC based off this criteria. Here's what we see, Carm. The problem was— and this is in tech, I don't— that we haven't seen this over in auto repair shops with technicians, but for software engineers, what we started seeing was Wow, these resumes start looking very similar to the last ones we got.

10:11Oh, and the last ones we got. And so you've got AI versus AI. You've got AI writing the resume and then you've got AI grading the resume and then you've got— and I swear we did one interview, Karm, where we were talking to a guy who was using AI. It was not a person. It was really like an AI persona of this guy.

10:30And it was insane. But it was taking a couple seconds to respond and it was just this real awkward interchange. So yeah, we thought it was funny. AI versus AI. And it was just crazy. Wait a minute, you didn't hear Will Robinson? Danger, danger. Close, Carm. It was insane. The delay was like, hold on, this is weird. Like, why are you waiting?

10:53You think you got duped? Well, we didn't hire him. So without a question, there's a lot of people that are leveraging it in all kinds of different ways. What technicians, I have not seen this yet. Service advisors and those resumes that we do feed into the machines to say, hey, let's look at some of the qualifications, anything that stands out, any red flags that stand out, go do a little research on them.

11:13See if you can find more on them. If you got a Facebook or, you know, I know there's some legalities around, you know, you're not supposed to do some of this stuff, but you know, I think that allowing it to kind of go and do some background checks for you is okay. You know, as long as you're— I don't know if you're having somebody fill out a resume and you tell them you're going to do a background check and all that on them, then it's all legal, right?

11:33So at your stores, Chris, are you saying to your service advisors, your whatever you call them, client advocates, to use AI to improve our descriptions and for your guys in the back to write a little bit better prose to send up front? Yeah. So practical sense was AutoFlow. Back a year and a half ago, we launched AI technician rewrite notes. Where is exactly that?

11:57And Carm, I wrote this, you know, here's the thing, you know, I'm gonna claim to be still a shop owner who is still writing software for the industry and I eat my own dog food, I do. So I had one of my technicians who had a problem with English. He's just not great with English. We had this joke and it was like, oh, you know, so-and-so, he likes to use the word sipping whenever there's a hose leak instead of seeping, he puts S-I-P-P-I-N-G versus S-E-E-P.

12:26Which was a simple mistake. I could probably make the mistake too. And so we're like, how can we solve this to where a customer doesn't read it and go, oh my God, what is, how can my hose sip? So we wrote the AI technician rewrite note where you can click a button and then basically it rewrites it to say, hey, this is leaking and here's the reason why it's leaking and here's, you know, some remedies for it.

12:47Now it's funny, as of recently, I've had shops come back on me and they're like, oh, your AI notes is not very good. I'm like, okay, once again, context of what it is helps. So, you know, if you have something and it's like air filter bad, needs replacing, air filter dirty, needs replace— like the more you tell it, the better it is versus air filter bad.

13:10Okay, like how bad is it? Like it's with any human that you communicate with, to what degree do they interpret what you're trying to tell them? So once again, the more context you can put around what it is there, it's trying to rewrite for you., the better the outcome will go. And once again, I've— Carm, you probably got 1,000 examples of people who have come to you and said, ah, it just don't work.

13:30I tried ChatGPT, I put in like, it wiles the world round, and it gave me a bad answer. Or, but as an example of just AI technician rewrite notes, give it a little context and it does a great job, Carm, of making your shop seem very intelligent and your technicians seem 10 times more intelligent than what they appear to be, even though we know technicians are extremely intelligent.

13:52But they didn't go to school for grammar. What I just heard you say about people trashing something that comes back to them that they don't like or they don't believe in— I'm an individual, and I think like you, I have a wider attitude on things. And I think people have to have a wider attitude and not jump on the first time you are uncomfortable.

14:16And because I always believe garbage in Garbage out. You lived this your whole life having been in software. And so if you're going to say something that's not— AI is not gonna understand 3 words that I'm asking it to do something for me. It's just not. And that's what the Thought Leader book brought me is you've gotta really communicate with that AI bot or whatever.

14:43You've really gotta tell it a little bit more about what you're looking for and a little bit of the why you're looking for it. Then it's gonna come back at me, even ask you a question. Oh, in the vein of the last time you did this, or blah, blah, blah, blah, and I can do this. And then it writes something. You don't have to accept it.

15:00You could go on and say, do this, shorten it, make it right. Do the— I'm loving the fact that, damn it, Chris, I'm having a damn relationship with a computer. So, and then in the book it talks about that, right? It talks about prompting and saying, hey, tell it that it's your strategic thought leader and that you're going through this drill with financials and then say, hey, Ask me a question one at a time until you get enough context behind understanding what it is that I'm trying to do.

15:26A lot of people don't realize you can tell the machines to ask you the questions one at a time, and then you can get that context like you're talking about. So it gets the context of what you're truly trying to do. Yeah, the one at a time thing, he repeated that in every chapter. One at a time. Please ask me these questions one at a time.

15:45I found that to be so powerful. It was an alliteration inside of that book. He was talking about, and again, we'll always bring this down to our industry, but he is talking about big corporate executives looking at strategic plans and working with their executive team, trying to figure stuff out. And I started to think about, I'm ready to buy my third store.

16:04Chris, sounds familiar, right? In the bank, my partner, you know, needs to give me some money 'cause they know I can pay it back and I've got a great plan to pay it back in 5 years. But they want to see a business plan from me. I go to my accountant, he's busy, it's tax season, blah, blah, blah. This machine, this computer, this quantum whatever can help you.

16:27It can, Carm. The story— I'll back up. We had a third property we were looking at, and my brother, who's my partner, he's been partnering shops for a long time, he was technician, Patrick. We kept going to the shop and I'm like, Patrick, this is one we need to buy, we need to buy. And he was like, man, I just don't have a good feeling about it.

16:44So I'm frustrated. I'm negotiating a price, I get a good price. And so I'm working with AI and I'm like, okay, you know, what it's worth, what are some of the comps around, blah, blah, blah. And lo and behold, Carm, I find the third property that we purchased in communication with AI. It's like, hey, here's a comp. This is being sold here in this area for this much.

17:05But, and I'm like, why do I not know about this? I have business brokers. I have LoopNet, I have people that call me all the time and I did not know about this. Funny thing, Carm, when I then started, me and my brother drove out to it, we're like, "This is amazing." Then everybody's like, "Oh yeah, we've known about that property forever."

17:22And it's like, "What?" But the machine helped me, guide me to not only negotiating on this, trying to find this one property, but then getting all the documentation together to purchase this property when it comes to business plans. I have business plans, I'm a business guy, you know that. But my business plans aren't always up to date. So running it through and saying, hey, let's update a couple numbers, update a couple slides in here.

17:44It is once again something that has exponentially allowed me to do things in a much quicker fashion as a leader, right? Versus, oh man, it's gonna take me some time. You know, as a leader, Carmen, and you do a lot on leadership in your podcast, leadership, a lot of times we're doing one-off tasks. Right? When you get to a true leadership position, you're not doing the things over and over again because you've already hired somebody to do those things over and over again.

18:10So the one-off tasks are those things that you have to think about. They're the strategy sessions, they're the forecasts, they're the SWOT analysis, they're the this, the that. You can't go give it to an admin. You can't give it to— you have to put thought through it. So I think once again, what I've learned with AI is, wow, I have really allowed myself to exponentially expedite some of these tasks that I've done as far as leadership goes.

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21:31You just nailed something so powerful. I've offered some classes this year to some of the conferences to do my mastermind, but put a twist in it, doing a SWOT, S-W-O-T, with a select group of CEOs. Okay. And you just bombarded me with. I just recently also did a SWOT for a friend of mine here in Buffalo. He had his annual meeting and I went in and I've never believed that the owner should do the SWOT on his own, 'cause he may challenge some of the think and that's not what they're there for, right?

22:02So we wrote all these papers that, can you imagine typing that up inside of AI and say, can you develop me? I'm gonna give you the A's and S, the A's and the B's and the C's, how we've designed. And can you come up with a strategic plan or the things that we need to start doing right now to reach these particular goals and to be able to fight these threats and to improve our weaknesses?

22:27In fact, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna go to my friend. I'm gonna ask him to gimme those results again, and I wanna put 'em inside of, uh, AI and compare and contrast. Absolutely. And not everything that it tells you is good, but it will tell you good things. Yeah, you're right. It could charge your brain. Not that, You're 100% right.

22:44It may not be perfect, but it could get you to 45 RPMs, not 33. Correct. I've used it multiple times, not only for the auto repair shops. Look, opening up in Farmersville, smaller location. It's the smallest population we've ever had, Carm, when it came to our other shops, right? So super small. I spent a lot of time on statistics, marketing area, what small shops do, what— how have they been successful?

23:12And a lot of this is, yeah, sure, it's common knowledge. Go support the high school and stuff like that. But there's other ideas and other things that you can ruminate on and go, why? I never really thought about that in that way. So let me take that and start adding on to this idea. Not necessarily giving you the idea, but helping you, like you say, ruminate and come up with some different strategies that you yourself may not have thought of.

23:35Got it. Wow. And talk about being able to look at a shop in a market that you'd love to be in in an owner who's interested in selling. And yeah, there's the affordability piece. I get that. But also the decision that you think, I want to buy this place, I love it, I can do a million things with it. But if you could let AI do a market sweep or an opportunity for you, how much income, how many vehicles, what's the age, it's going to tell you all that.

24:01Yeah, some of it's accurate, some of it's not. I mean, you can kind of piece pieces together. The good thing is we have a lot of marketing companies that can get you that information as well as, you know, that's Karm feeding some of that in with the, you know, the machine and saying, here's some data that I got from other companies, here's some data I got from here, here's some data I got from the internet.

24:18Hey, let's kind of turn this together and look at it as a whole picture because it's a piece that it may have, may only be a little piece of it. So I agree with you, Karm, like taking this data that you can get from other sources and feeding it to it to get a more, well, which is, once again, go back to like your extended brain.

24:35The more information we have as a leader, the better decision that we're equipped to make. Well, AI is the same way. The more information you give it, the better it's going to be able to distinguish and give you a better direction for where you're going. Caveat emptor. Caveat emptor. Please enlighten me. Isn't that Latin for buyer beware? Sure. Yes. Okay. Probably buyer beware.

24:56And so if I'm going to push that information and it's going to tell me, yeah, buy this place real good. And you didn't check the sourcing that you got from your AI. Again, what a tool. And if that tool can be accurate up to 75% or allow you some more time to do the other things that we're time challenged for, I would say that, that document that you're printing, that you're putting down inside of all the work you need to do, needs to be referenced.

25:25But you're sitting down with one of your people and they've got an opinion and an idea. You have them on your team for the right reasons, but it doesn't necessarily mean they're right in every case. Carm, you're absolutely right. And if you see it as that other person, as another person on your exec team that's going to give you their opinion, you don't have to act on any of your people's opinions.

25:44You're the leader. I'll tell you this, Carm, right now— so you've heard this term probably— right now is the worst AI is ever going to be, but right now is the cheapest AI is ever going to be. So let's think about technology and technology turns and what recently happened, let's say, with Netflix and streaming. Remember streaming 5, 6, 8 years ago, Carm?

26:02You could $10 and you could have no commercials and you could have every movie you ever wanted for next to nothing. What has happened to streaming? It is worse than cable now. It is, oh, well, you're paying this one, you got to watch commercials now. Oh, you gotta pay more. Oh, but you have to have 17 subscriptions to— because that movie, well, yeah, only they have access to it.

26:26So you see what I'm saying? Like, it's going to turn into that. So I would suggest anybody listening, like, now is the greatest time to get in because Tokens are cheap, right? And that's— everything's based off of these tokens. So you go to talk to ChatGPT or Claude or whatever is your favorite, Groq, there's so many out there. It's all based off tokenized data.

26:48And right now we're getting in at the ground floor. In 5 years from now, Carm, it's going to be subscription on subscription on subscription on subscription. It will be killed with the amount of costs that we have. So that's another thing I keep, you know, trying to emphasize to people. Like, man, you can go for $20 and buy these subscriptions to these genius models and leverage them, run one versus the other versus the other.

27:13I mean, Google's got Gemini. Like, there are so many platforms and apps out there right now that you can run against that are just wonderful. You gave me a chart. ChatGPT, Midjourney, is that AI? It's a picture, video, yeah, picture thing. Yeah, I gave you a couple. Yeah. Oh, video thing, Claude. I mean, God. So front of shop, back of shop. Let's talk about some of the uses that you are currently doing in your shop and the software and all the people that you know in the industry.

27:41What's going on front of house? Are we using it to help translate some of the junk we're getting from the back to have a much more warm and friendly RO? Yes, I'm a software guy too. So in AutoFlow, we're about to launch AI Rewrite everything. So that's from any time there's any type of writing back to the customer, you can then basically use the, you know, and we've improved our prompting and all this, right?

28:05Because what we've noticed is, yeah, why go one place to generate something and then have to go back into tool? So basically what we're doing is we're encompassing it all into our tool. So any type of customer communication, whether it be the workflow, hey, the workflow message, Carm, It's the same thing every time, right? Carm comes in, it's like, hey, your car's being checked in.

28:24Hey, no, we're working on your vehicle. The vision is in the future, it's like, hey, Carm, hadn't seen you all. Oh, thanks for coming back with this. Hey, you know what? We got Jim, he's looking at your vehicle, where it's very much more personalized because we have this data on you and this understanding of who you are, which a lot of our, I guess, routine or automated responses to customers, they're scripted.

28:47We could do so much more with unscripting those and making it very— seem very natural. And that's what we're working on. That's what we're going to improve. AI technician rewrite notes was kind of our first place because we collected a lot of data, a lot of understanding, a lot of improvements, right? And that's software in general, right? You put something out, you hope it's good, and then you improve on it.

29:06So yes, front of the house, absolutely, you know, right? Rewriting even our own notes that can go out to customers. And we're even talking about rewriting the summary, right, of what goes out to the customer so there's a summarized understanding of what they're seeing. Because we understand the inspection is not necessarily a good thing. It's a good thing. So yes, DVI is a good thing.

29:29But, Carm, when you have 20 items you got to go look at and you got to go through all these different sections and you don't really understand, it gets confusing. So how can you simplify that? So a consumer can get a summary of what's going on, what needs to be addressed, what can be later. You know, what your service advisor does, but in a more natural language way of communicating with the customer.

29:51I just love what you said. I wrote too many notes. I'm not sure I can get to all my thoughts here, Chris, but you said something so powerful and you kept talking about the customer and the reception of the customer to the wording that we're giving them. And part of me going out and doing my keynote on the rise of the specialist and try— it's all invoked in the professionalism, increasing the professionalism of our industry.

30:16And a lot of the things that you were saying to me that it looks like you're driving is the sophistication of the language that we use. And if that can be stronger to this client, then the perceived value coming back is professionalism. That's it, Carm. We have great people in our shops, but I said this earlier, they're not grammar experts, they're not language experts, they're not spelling experts.

30:44This absolutely gives them an avenue and your shop to look professional, which is exactly what you've been promoting for all the right reasons. And it gives us an avenue to very quickly look professional. Trust but verify. Don't trust everything it rewrites, but there's absolutely, I think, a major change coming. Once again, to the industry, we always say this, you know, you said it before, AI is like, man, this is just not going away.

31:07It's only going to improve. It's only going to get better. This is the worst it's ever going to be, which means that, wow, if this is the worst, what we have is going to be amazing. I'm going to bring it off to quality control for what? And I think the industry has done a good job of now doing quality control in shops.

31:25I know I was one of the early person to talk about quality control. The reason is because I come from the software industry and hey, it's something you did in software. I know Aaron Stokes was somebody who believed in quality control and there were a couple and there wasn't a lot, but I pushed it hard and I think a bunch of people pushed it hard and it came out.

31:39Well, a lot of shops, the first objection they get with quality control is, why are you double-checking my work? Do you not trust me? Why are you doing that? And it has nothing to do with that. It's that professionalism that you talk about, which is making sure the customer gets their car back in better shape. You can ruin the whole visit of that $2,000 spin, fix all their problems, and if there's a glob of grease on their steering wheel, you've ruined it all.

32:02So think about that. You're sending out an inspection to a customer, you're communicating to them, and every misspelled word or incorrect grammar— for somebody who really is like— there are people in this world who love language and love grammar. You're giving them opportunity to go, wow, they don't even care enough to spell that right. And that's not even a properly worded sentence.

32:22There are people out there like that. Why would we ever give ourselves an excuse not to deliver that professionalism to 'em? You know, Chris, to your point on the QC, my son went to a shop, my shop, one of my greatest friends and customers back in the day, drove his car away and his left rear tire was further ahead of him than his car was.

32:47They felt really, really bad about it. And I tell this story occasionally when you bring up the QC. The QC is not done after the QC is done. One of the specialists does it and then they yell out for a check and an individual who will be free, they will make themselves free to go back and to check that the lugs were torqued right.

33:10And if anyone says, what do you mean you're checking me? Just tell the story about the wheel coming off, because anybody worth their salt who's been around a while realizes the humbleness of making a mistake that big. And that goes to prove that if we were going to give the best client experience in the world and be untouchable in the marketplace, we have to verify what we do.

33:37We just must. And why? Because we're human and there's mistakes that happen. There's things going on at home, there's things going on at work, there's things going on in the world. And sometimes, every once in a while, we draw a freaking blank and we just can't see straight. Agreed. And QC is just one of those professionalism, just like language that we speak to customers.

34:01It's one of those things that we could fall into a gap that we don't need to, right? We don't need to fall into this gap of not doing this thing. We now have this ability to do this thing and do it very professional, like you said. Okay, software is really stepping up and helping out in that regard. And after I was listening to your last rant, I wrote this down: your words need to flow through the curtain of professionalism.

34:30Excellent. You love that? Your words need to flow through the curtain of professionalism. You're your own AI, Carm. That is a beautiful AI statement right there. If you are wondering why there, there's a, there's a, why do I have to do this? When you put in some of the words that you want to use and it comes back and it says, damn, I'm not that smart.

34:55Would I really have ever written that? And the point of it is, It's the curtain of professionalism. Use it, go with it, change a word if you want. If it doesn't sound like you, then you start sounding like that. Exactly, Carm. In this industry, there's a lot of fear when it comes to adopting technology. I think the good thing is I've seen a lot more people, I think, like, okay, AI is here and we're using it to some degree.

35:21Even though I just read this study not too long ago, it was like a lot of people in their jobs, although they have the tools, they're not using it. It was Gen Z specifically. They're like, nope, not using it. It was like 30 3% or something. We're just like, yeah, sure, we tell our boss that we're using it, but we're just not going to use it because we don't care.

35:38As small business owners, independent business owners, right? Hey, one of the SWOT analysis, you know, that I've done with Golden Rule with AI, and I'm like, hey, what do you think is going to kill our industry? And it's technician training, right? Electrical, the vehicles, a technician shortage. And I'm like, eh, I don't know. Last time we put on an ad for technicians, we've gotten a lot.

35:59It's aptitude and ability and training, which, you know, you're very big on. And then it was, you know, the consolidation of the industry, all of the private equity money that's come in, that, that's in private equity money, that man changes the game. So we're not on the same playing field as other shops that have private equity money behind them. That is, you know, go do a lot of research on private equity, whether you love it or hate it, I don't care.

36:24It changes what they have the capability of doing versus what we have. And it is a threat regardless of you're like, hey, you know, this one, I'm not going to name one. Oh, they don't really service their customers well. Yeah, but they charge like really low prices. They have massive budgets for marketing. They have, you know, all these things that we don't have access to.

36:44So once again, here we are on this next revolution of technology. Let's jump on it. Let's leverage it what we can, because as small business owners, we need this, right? We need to jump on it early, get these wins in. Build our businesses up. I'm all about small business owners. Carm, you're all about small business owners. It's a hard job for us in what we do.

37:03I love small business owners because I really do believe we make the world go round, right? And we make the world better. Truly. Well said, Chris. In the shop, your specialists in the bays, are they using AI maybe to punch in, look for a TSB or a code or anything? We have used the ChatGPT and some of the models to see and try and go down diagnostic trees to see what's going on.

37:26I'm not going to promote any tools. There's some on the market that are starting to rise and pop. And then it goes to, okay, how well of their— is their data trained, right? So you have these large LLMs, these smaller LLMs. We're not going to get into the technical details, but like some of the bigger ones, your ChatGPTs and your Clouds, like they're not bad when it comes to some diagnostic.

37:46But then, you know, this is a slippery slope of, oh, they're idiots. I can't believe that they try to diagnose this. There are some in the industry that are now trying to train models specifically with repair data. So say, take this dataset, leverage it with this dataset and let's get more specific. And we will see that coming more and more. Carm, I mean, in the future, what is our front counter gonna look like?

38:05Will there be one person at the front counter and two techs in the back of the shop? And that's all you're gonna need, right? Because your phones are gonna be answered by an assistant and they're gonna make any outbound calls by the assistant. And your technicians are gonna be able to get to the solution that much quicker because immediately they're gonna go, hey, here's the code, here's a couple pictures, here's this.

38:24That's coming. So are you going to need as many people in the future? Probably not. I think that's definitely going to change. Yeah. I love it. You know, estimates in half the time as an example. That's it. Yes. But the productivity, the production, the flow, the car count should be able to be increased. And, you know, if labor is one of the highest costs of an industry and we could use tools computers, systems, AI technology, I don't know if I covered 'em all to make us more effective and more efficient, then damn, sign me up.

39:01But buyer beware, you know, everything that you did, I put the right switch so that the estimate is figured. There is no simple vanilla ice cream cone out there. You know, I wanna be careful cuz you said like you can read the doom and gloom, on the internet about how AI is going to take all the jobs and nobody's going to have any jobs.

39:20And you can read the other rosy side, which is like, no, everything is going to be great. There's going to create more jobs. I think there's an in-between. There will definitely be jobs going away. I can see that from the software side. I can already tell you this, like our software engineers are capable of doing so much more than they ever were before.

39:36Junior devs are going to go away. Unfortunately, they're probably already gone. So it's interesting. The industry or the world said shift over, become a software engineer. And then it's like, yeah, if you're a software engineer and you're graduating right now, you're probably hurting. And, you know, Mike Rowe, you know, and you, and there's been a lot of influences were like, hey, go get a, you know, blue-collar job, you know, plumbing, auto repair, AC repair, go do it now.

40:01And everybody's like, nope, go get a job, go get a college degree and you get a good job. And now it's like, oh crap, should have been listening. Those jobs are probably going to be around for a long time. Thank you for laying this in my lap, which sometimes you do very well. It's not a trade anymore. And that's one of the big things that I talk about.

40:19It's a career. I don't care if you're a plumber, you're a carpenter, you're an electrician, you are a mechanic, which even people are saying is the worst ugly word that Hollywood has made us look so bad in. You're a specialist in so many areas and highly educated, and you're working on computer systems. It's a high-tech career. It's not a job, it's a career.

40:41And all the trade schools that are out there have got to stop saying we're a trade school, but they're— you're a skilled career center. That's what they are. And I don't care if plumbing hasn't changed in 100 years or electrical, you still have to have a special skill to know, respect, and understand. And in fact, you gotta be licensed. Don't get me started.

41:03Yes, I agree with you, Carm. Your Rise of the Specialist, I think all of the things that you have been promoting, you wrote that 2 years ago? A year and a half, a year and 3/4 ago, yeah. So you are on the cusp of what is coming. And so I love you, you know I do, and I love what you promote, and I love that you help the industry.

41:23But man, you're really on to, yes, you know, and man, you know, kudos for you for seeing this, understanding this. And helping this industry rise. AI will help it rise too. The veil that you're talking about of, you know, language and— hey, look, one of the other things we have a problem with sometimes in our own shops is, oh crap, we don't speak Spanish, we're in Texas.

41:44Well, hey, you know what, it's pretty easy to translate back and forth with, you know, AI and all the— so just think about some of the communication barriers and some of the things we're going to be able to help us once again stay professional And that's it. Trust but verify too. Don't just blindly go off and trust everything it says. But I think these breakthroughs that we're seeing now and will continue to see will be big gains for this industry.

42:08Huge gains. Well, how interesting. I've got this client of mine that really speaks a little English, but not a lot. And, and I got by with them on the phone and in front of me. But here it is. I want to send them this estimate. And smart me says, let me throw all my right words after I've done it in English and worked with AI and my team.

42:29Let me pop it in there and says, can you gimme the Spanish translation for that? And then I send it and they light up because they now understand a whole lot better than me or them listening to my broken English or their broken English or whatever. But that's dazzling. That's what makes for a great client experience. Thinking outside the box. Okay. So I had a wild thought about, okay, I'm bought in and I'm not gonna fight it anymore and I'm gonna go play with it and I'm gonna do these things and I'm gonna go read that book and I'm gonna listen to this episode a couple times.

43:01Can I go to a— at Vision last year, and I don't remember, is there a seminar where people are going out and teaching how this, how AI works in the shop? I'm gonna do something that's, you're probably gonna never invite me back on your podcast for, but there's a podcast. Called All In, and it's got David Sacks on. It's all these guys from basically from the Valley, from Silicon Valley, a bunch of angel investors and big investors.

43:26I'd suggest to you too, Carm, it is probably one of the best, other than yours, outside of the industry. This is— these guys are once again all geniuses, all billionaires multiple times over, and they are constantly talking about AI and the models and how it's affecting the industry. And this is a— so it's called All In. And once again, I believe yours is the best podcast in the world.

43:48They claim theirs is the best in the world. But for me, it's been a great source to hear real-time, very smart guys who are very connected to this whole industry right now talking about all the ins and outs. Now, they do talk about some politics and wars and stuff like that. You can skip through that part. But the tech part that they talk about in the real world, you know, what's going, you know, like They just had one on, it was cybersecurity risk with this Claude Mythos.

44:15So Claude Mythos, right? Oh my God. They didn't release it because basically they're saying it is such a kick-ass model that they're releasing. It can go find these security vulnerabilities and all this software and it can exploit them. So they're giving it right now to a certain number of big companies and small companies and letting them fix things before they release it because it's so badass.

44:36That is truly scary when you're thinking, oh, so that could be some publicity there. But they talk about this. They talk about this new model and what's going on and why it's smart to hold it back, why it's not good. One of the guys is like, giving somebody 100 days to fix this is not going to happen because you realize in software it takes so long before you can patch these things.

44:54So it's really kind of more, you know, smoke and mirrors or whatever, but very insightful. So, you know, a lot of people are starting to talk about it, Carm, in our industry, but I'm finding more resources outside of the industry that probably have more expertise in it, right? Because there's so much to it and there's so much depth to it to understand kind of this higher level.

45:15And this has been one of my sources that I'd suggest strongly. I can see shop owners though, going out and submitting a class to some of the conferences and says, how to AI. They're not an expert. They didn't write it, but they can share how they've integrated it. And so I'm challenging anyone out there who says, hey, I know AI, I get it.

45:34Well, I think the industry needs a class or two, even if it's a video, if it's an online class. Every time I think of AI, I think about the computing power. Chris, this is gonna be my, our final thought, the computer power that it takes to do what it does in microseconds. Okay. And I just wonder if in these data centers, they're actually, IBM is building quantum computers to put in there.

45:58Oh yes. Quantum computing is the, like, that is the holy grail of computing, right? Cuz it's, you know, they talk about how it's another, qubits, right? Holding all states at all times, but then they're unstable. But then they're like, hey, we can use AI to stabilize it. Which I go do some— there's some interesting articles on how now Bitcoin is worried about quantum computing because basically it was like it could break Bitcoin, you know, cryptography or cryptology in like seconds, you know, where it was like, oh no, Bitcoin's going to take 1,000 years with the technology.

46:30And so now they're trying to figure out how they can improve this So when this thing does come out, because it will, there's absolutely a problem with computing power, with energy. I was just in Louisiana spending some time there for business and pleasure. In the small area where we go a lot, they're putting up a couple data centers, like, and I'm like, oh my God, like, and I'm like, yeah, that makes sense, right?

46:55Everywhere, right? In these small towns and states and stuff like that, they're going out and they're just, they're gonna build these things like crazy. They have to because the amount of energy that's used to run these machines and feed these machines is extraordinary. If you do any research on it, it's just— I mean, it's small cities in like hours of what they're using.

47:14I had a crazy reason to bring that up. Last week I was at the Brakes for Breasts check presentation that this year, it's year to date, $2.4 million they've raised for the industry. That it's just the people at Cleveland Clinic are just aghast at how the industry has rallied around this cause for a vaccine for triple-negative breast cancer that just finished phase 1 trials.

47:40And they had like a most incredible result of the immunity that people— I tingle when I hear about it. But the Cleveland Clinic has one of the first IBM quantum computers in it, and it is on display at this interesting space. And every year they seem to take us to this space and Tracy and I got another picture in front of it, and they describe how this thing works, all the circuitry in it.

48:07And you could go behind it and you could see things. I mean, there's a lot that they don't show you in this glass room, standing all alone in this big, if you will, you walk into a hotel, what do they call it? A lobby. It's on display in the lobby. And then I asked the doctors, I says, you guys are using this?

48:25He says, oh yeah, every day for research. Every day for research. -472°F is the cold that they have to have to keep the chips responsive. God Almighty. It's— I'm sorry. I'm blown away by it and where our world and technology is going. So everyone, if we are building hardware that's going to keep up with our software, then you need to make AI part of your world.

48:58Make it a part of your world now. You get in, it's the early stages of Netflix. Get your subscriptions now. Use it, abuse it, figure it out. Because if you get in later, it's just going to cost you more money. Eventually you're going to have to get in, right? Eventually you're going to have to buy the subscription. Get in now while it's cheap is what I'd say.

49:17And I would say to Carm also, Trust but verify. We're going to see new vendors popping up. We're going to see— and I'm always, man, ask, you know, shop owner, man, ask who they are, where they came from, give them some history. Be careful of the fly-by-nights that come in, get a bag of money and swoop out. Because, you know, we'll see that.

49:38And it seems like kind of, you know, I've seen it once or twice in the industry and I always hate it because once again, I like— I love shop owners and what we do. Everybody's trying to work hard for their dollar. That we derm. We take care of a lot of people that are in our flock that, you know, the Lord's, you know, asked us to shepherd.

49:53And so when outside wolves come in, it bothers me. So yeah, trust but verify. Ask me, ask my team, ask Harm. We're open books when it comes to trust but verify. Thank you for your smarts and your wisdom. Always a pleasure to have you on the show. Chris Cloutier, autoflow.com, Golden Rule Auto Care, now with their 3 stores. And also a sponsor with me in the Remarkable Results Toastmasters.

50:21We have a Toastmasters page on our website, forward slash Toastmasters. Go and get involved in that. And you know, I continue to be active in there twice a month, every first and second Thursday. There's a little plug for it, right? Plug it away. Hey, regardless what AI does, being a better communicator, a more effective communicator is a good thing. Oh, I love your point.

50:43Oh my God. Let's go back. Here it is. AI is sending me stuff. Now you have to read, which is like listening to AI. Yes. It all ties in. Listen, no one has to pay for this episode. It was, there was so much value here. It's amazing. Thank you for having me, Carm. I appreciate it. It's always great talking with you. Thanks, Chris.

51:02Appreciate it, man. Thanks for being on board to listen and learn from the premier automotive repair business podcast, Remarkable Results Radio. Get your episodic education on the ARPN listening app at automotiverepairpodcastnetwork.com. Also enjoy the podcast on our Carm Capriato YouTube channel. Carm is all for advancing the professional automotive service industry. Until next time.