Those of a certain age can chuckle at the thought of older people struggling with technology. Remember grandmom trying to use a television remote for the first time? Or that time when your father opened 47 windows when attempting to board the information superhighway. And we would hold in a giggle as we learned over their shoulders to show them where they went wrong.
Well, it’s not so hilarious anymore, now that new tech has invaded our generation. But we’re not alone. Users of every age group are marveling at artificial intelligence (AI) and struggling to understand how they can make it work for them. Some people will want to know “where do you go to, um, AI things?” The questions abound. How does it work? What allows it to be so intelligent? What exactly can it do? And is that damn thing going to swoop in and take my job?
It is in this vein that we open the June State of the Industry report on AI. Our panel of dealer tech wizards offer their views on how it’s being embraced, overcoming objections and cultivating a healthy, non-adversarial attitude toward it. Most importantly, it’s about showing both team members and end-users that it has boundless possibilities and can alleviate those annoyingly mundane tasks. That, in turn, can take much of the burden out of their professional lives.
Like many dealers, Donnellon McCarthy Enterprises of Cincinnati wanted its foray into AI to be a value-add and not a substitute for the personal touch that drives business, noted Rich Brandenburg, senior vice president of sales. He credits working with West McDonald of the advisory firm GoWest.ai with alleviating concerns in leveraging ChatGPT.
“The tool itself wasn’t overly complex,” Brandenburg said. “We didn’t need deep technical training, just some basic guidance on how to use it effectively. Once our team got comfortable with it, they quickly started finding ways to use it in their day-to-day work.”
Work Differently
One of the keys to getting the most out of the technology is conditioning people to work differently without making them feel threatened or frustrated. Pointing out several technology shifts over the years, Clay Ostlund—the president of the IT division for Marco—notes there are pivotal moments in time where people have to change, and the AI movement is one of them. There are two choices: embrace it, and become more efficient. Or eschew it, and make the replacement fear a self-fulfilling prophecy.
“I like to say that AI is not going to replace anybody’s job. It’s learning how not to use AI is what’s going to replace your job,” Ostlund said. “People have to learn how to use it and embrace it. I can use Microsoft Copilot to summarize meetings and create action steps. I have more capacity than I did six months ago. You can drop a PowerPoint presentation into AI and ask it to create an elevator pitch. Something that would take a team of people four hours has now been reduced to four minutes. But not every person is going to make the transition to work differently.”
The fear of the unknown related to working with AI still causes a degree of trepidation among the team members at Pacific Office Automation (POA). Chris Miller, vice president of technology and solutions for the Beaverton, Oregon-based dealership, points out that the more they dabble with it, the more their confidence increases.
Not surprisingly, there’s an acceptance chasm between millennials/Gen Zs and baby boomers/Generation X. “A rep who recently graduated will definitely gravitate more towards using it than someone in their mid-50s,” Miller said. “As [older employees] see the benefit and how much time it saves them, they want to utilize it a bit more. They’re just a little more cautious about it.”
Some dealers, such as Cleveland-based Blue Technologies, employed a thoughtful approach when it embarked on AI applications. Lauren Hanna, division president, noted how privacy and transparency were the boxes AI needed to check off, and any tools needed to dovetail with the dealer’s overall service philosophy.
She was a bit surprised, however, at how downstream some team members were in their use of AI technologies. It was important to Hanna that they understood how to use it responsibly.
“That was an eye-opener; it showed us how important it was to set clear guidelines and put policies in place, so we all stay on the same page about what’s appropriate and secure,” she said. “Now, our technology team reviews all new AI solutions to weigh the risks and benefits before we put anything into practice.”
Training Wheels
While Chris Williams—director of marketing for All Copy Products (ACP) in Denver—is an unabashed AI fan who believes the business community is only scratching the surface of what the technology can do, it’s important to vet platforms that have policies in place to secure data. But as for usage, the technology can need to be restrained—give it guardrails, as he noted—via specific prompting. Allowing AI too much latitude can have unwanted results.
“There’s been problems with AI creating incorrect information on its own when it couldn’t find anything,” Williams added.
As an example, he’s been working on AI agents specialized in ACP’s products and services. Thus, clients or prospects can use the agent to ask a question about anything related to an offering, and that agent will scan the product documentation that Williams fed into it to produce an answer.
“When I was building that agent, one directive I had to give it was, if you don’t know the answer to the question, don’t make something up,” he said. “I instructed the agent to say ‘I’m sorry I don’t have that information. Go to this resource and you may be able to find what you need.’ That’s just a simple guardrail that can avoid those kind of issues going forward.”
Understanding Trepidation
The reaction to using AI internally can often vary on a department-by-department basis. Take Fraser Advanced Information Systems of West Reading, Pennsylvania. Its sales department has long been receptive to technology innovations that can improve their processes, so the introduction of AI was warmly embraced, noted Justin Drabouski, vice president of technology and security.
Although the company’s leadership had made the decision to leverage AI in a way that would augment staff, not replace them, team members in other departments were concerned what the tech could mean for their positions in the long run. “We spent a lot of time, effort and energy in upscaling our existing team to bring them along for the journey,” Drabouski said. “So when I started talking about AI with the rest of the organization, it didn’t occur to me that not everyone would will be excited about bringing some of these capabilities in that will help reduce the burden on them.”
He certainly empathizes with team members who fear that their core value as an employee is being diminished. “I’m an engineer at heart, it’s my background,” Drabouski noted. “If my primary behavior is to be the person who solves your problem, and now you’re leaving me with one less problem to solve, I could potentially see that as a decrease in the value that I bring the company or to the customer. So as we’re having conversations, not everyone is going to look at it favorably. So we need to educate them on our vision and work with the teams to guide them through this process.”
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