Chris Garcia on Digitizing the Automotive World

Paul Daly: 0:00We're here with Chris Garcia, head of us automotive for any line.

‍Unknown: 0:05

This is Amplified, a retail automotive podcast brought to you by Reuters events and to suits you. It's time to make the most innovative voices in retail automotive. Louder.

Paul Daly: 0:23

Chris, good to have you here today.

Chris Garcia: 0:24

Thank you, Paul.Happy to be here,

Paul Daly: 0:26

man. So tell us about any line. Yeah, cuz it's kind of a new one for Kyle and I, and you're here at the writers event. Give give us the 62nd summary.

Chris Garcia: 0:36

Yeah, so like high level, it's a smart data capture company. So we're focused on basically, hey, we see our physical world today, right? And our customers see the physical world? And how can we take that and actually digitize it? Right.So everything from small things that you might already think about, like alphanumeric characters, up to things like the tread depth on your tires,right? All of that can be captured and processed. And that's what we want to put into their customers hands.

Paul Daly: 1:01

So you capture it, do what you want with it. Exactly.Okay.

Kyle Mountsier: 1:03

And when you say put it in a customer's hands,are you talking like the consumer or your b2b customers?

Chris Garcia: 1:09

Yeah, so this is interesting, right? Originally,we thought, hey, well, you know,obviously, we'll get this in the hands of our b2b customers,right. But what we see now is there's really this demand, you know, from some of our customers to get this in the consumers hands. And, you know, I mean,there's some things we've chatted about, right? But I think you start to see a lot of that with like, Tire Rack Discount Tire, right? You know,these companies that have these applications, and they really,you know, want to find a way to drive customers, you know, put the power in their hands. So I'll speak

Paul Daly: 1:39

how is drivers a discount tire going to deploy this? So customer in the customers hands? Yes.

Chris Garcia: 1:45

So really, a lot of this comes through like applications, right? So it's got to either come through a web application or a mobile application. So there's got to be some application in there,right? What's the

Paul Daly: 1:54

practical use? Like?what's the, what's the customer going to scan? Or take a picture of?

Chris Garcia: 1:59

Yeah, so literally, right. So like,imagine, hey, you wouldn't do this all the time. Right? But let's say for example, I send you a notification push notification, you got my application. Hey, Paul. It's been about you know, two years now. And I know on average,you're driving, let's say, you know, X amount of miles a month,you might want to scan those tires, right? Let's check the tread depth, right? And then boom, in, you know, 20 seconds,you've scanned your tires, I've communicated back to you the tread depth. Now, you realize,oh, crap, I've only got about15% tread life left on these tires. And what happens? Boom,by the way, these

Paul Daly: 2:33

are on sale. Yes,

Chris Garcia: 2:35

exactly. Exactly.Oh, and by the way, they happen to fit your view. Oh, yeah. Oh,I know what kind of tires those are right, by the way, because we also scan the sidewall.Right. So or I put them on ideally, that'd be great. Right.So I know what kind of tires you have on there. Would you like to see some replacement? Got it?Yeah.

Paul Daly: 2:51

That is I love that

Kyle Mountsier: 2:52

the practical applications that are pinging in my mind, right, yeah, I'm like,

Paul Daly: 2:57

you do a lot of other industries. What other industries? Do you deploy the tech and

Chris Garcia: 3:00

yeah, so so we do.Right. And I think, right now,so Automotive is absolutely our number one focus right now.Right? That is where we are, you know, we've got strong solutions already. But we're also focused.And if you look at our product roadmap, right, a lot of the things that we're trying to do are really pushing the boundaries in terms of damage detection, right. So, you know,kind of, again, more more, I would say, you know, for the let's call it the Carvanha is of the world and those companies that are trying to appraise and make that process, you know,less subjective, right? What did you see Kyle? Or what did you see, Paul? Objective?

Kyle Mountsier: 3:33

Earlier, you were saying? Like, we don't really have a use case for dealers, but like, dealers,acquiring vehicles sight unseen,service, mobile service, like there are so many people thinking about how do we get customers to give us enough data to know everything that we need to know about that car before we put an appraisal on the vehicle?Before it comes in for service?Like I think about this, and you guys have probably already done the sign but just on, hey, this vehicle is about to come in for service. Hey, before you bring it in, can you just snap, snap,snap, snap, snap? All of a sudden we have the data? Were pre ready for you to check in to pre check in? Yeah,

Chris Garcia: 4:08

well, absolutely.Right. And then take it a step further, right, like, now, let's say that the AI actually picked up and surface to you, right,the service advisor, oh, hey, by the way, I know that their tires are low, right. I also know that there's, you know, some damage on this side. So you know, I mean, those are the types of things that we're moving toward the damage on tire is actually something we're fairly close to.But then even again, all around the vehicle, right? So how do we how do we capture more into your point, right? How do we put that in the hands of the right people to actually give them the insights, actionable insights that they need to deliver those services?

Kyle Mountsier: 4:42

I love it.That's really, really cool. So when when you look at, because obviously you're solving a pain point for the businesses. What when when you think about like going one step layer past that and solving pain points for consumers. How does that like I mean, you're a consumer. We're all consumers like How does that solve a pain point? Not just for the b2b relationships, but the consumer side of stuff?

Chris Garcia: 5:04

Yeah, well, I think about like, it's I love the example of like tire tread.Because if I tell you, Hey,Kyle, you've got, you've got 230seconds left on that tire, you probably want to change that.What does that really mean to you? Right? What does that mean to the majority of people?Right? Is that the hell? It

Paul Daly: 5:21

should be? 30 To 30seconds. Yeah, right. Really?No,

Chris Garcia: 5:26

I don't know. And it's funny, right? Like, let's,you know, who knows? Many, many years ago? Who knows who invented that system and decided, you know,

Paul Daly: 5:33

what IQ score? Like,what's your good IQ score? I don't know. 100. Good or bad?It's not like it's not great.

Chris Garcia: 5:39

Intelligent quotient? I don't know what 62Good. Yeah. 100. public school.Yeah. So it's one of those things where like, when we look at it from, you know, the consumer perspective, it's kind of hard to build trust when I literally, like you're not speaking my language right. Now.If you tell me to 30 seconds.How much am I supposed to have?Like, that's, you know, and the little red, yellow, green,maybe. But that kind of looks gimmicky to me, right. Now,let's flip that conversation and say, Hey, I didn't just manually do something, or worse, do something that you didn't see.And I'm just telling you, right?You saw me scan this right now I'm showing you, right, a percentage element of transparency there. Exactly.Hey, look at the report. In fact, let's take it a step further. Let's look at the heat map of that tire. Right. Wow.That's I mean, that's all available. Right? I can show you the heat, right? Yeah, look, oh,yeah, you've actually got some uneven wear here, you notice that the inside of it is wearing down a lot faster than the answer, right? Again, that's the that's where we're going right.From a consumer perspective.Right now. I'm like, Ah, I can see it.

Kyle Mountsier: 6:43

Right. And it's not like we haven't had some level of technology that has done this in the past. Like,you've got an online machine,and maybe you got a machine that has like 50,000 hours, put it in the thing? And you're like, No,I actually took a picture from your phone as a customer, right?Yeah.

Chris Garcia: 7:03

One, it's one of those things, right. Like,everybody's got a phone. I mean,every look, every consumer,every tech in every shop,everybody everywhere has a smartphone. And this is something we said, you know,yesterday, we had a we had a session on this, right? And it's one of those things, this smartphone has more processing power than you even need to do these things. So why are we not leveraging it more? Right, just because it hasn't been done?Just hasn't been done? I mean,that's the only reason we can really see.

Paul Daly: 7:32

What's the biggest pushback you're getting on that.I mean, obviously, part of is like this is new. Right? That's always going to be there. But like, Why? Why do people take a step back from this?

Chris Garcia: 7:41

Now? You know,I'll be honest, we don't actually get a lot of nine. I don't say that just to you know,understand smoke, but we don't really get a lot of pushback, we get more awareness. Yeah, we get genuine interest and just sort of, Wow, I didn't think to do it that way. Because nobody's done it like that. It's typically been Oh, yeah, that $50,000solution I need to put in. Oh,but by the way, that doesn't really work. Well, when we're moving to a mobile world. Right.So when I've got to go to the customer's, you know, place a business home residence, right to actually perform the service.I can't really, I can't take that with me. Right. Yeah. So I made this massive investment.And I can't actually get full utilization on that investment.That's, that's not a good investment for anybody. Yeah.Right. So yeah, it's absolutely about, hey, let's get it to, you know, the mobile side of it.Let's get it to where it's going in the future and make sure that you're prepared to win.

Paul Daly: 8:32

Right. Where do you see is the ideal deployment of this in the dealership? I mean,service department obviously makes sense. Yeah, but but like,talk us through? What, like, if someone bought all the way in?Yeah. And someone bought all the way in? How's it working? Look,it's

Chris Garcia: 8:47

one of those things. I mean, granted, this is one element. So we do a lot more right in terms of hey, just digitizing anything and everything. You could think of a license, for example, right? You know how long it would take you just to write down all the information on a license if you hand me your license right now even keying it in? Yeah. Oh, I get

Paul Daly: 9:02

so annoyed when the credit card whatever app I'm using, doesn't let me scan the credit card. It's the worst.Yeah, you're like, Come on, man.That technology is easy.

Chris Garcia: 9:10

It's Yeah,exactly. It's there. Oh, by the way, it saves you a lot of time.Oh, and on top of that, it's accurate. Right? When you try to punch these things in, right,that's what we're trying to get away from is let's get away from that inefficient, inaccurate method of doing this. That's just kind of in the way, we've done it for a really long time.Let's digitize that right to make it faster, right, let's make it a lot more accurate,right, in fact, almost 100%accuracy in a lot of these solutions. So you know, that's where it's at. And I think

Kyle Mountsier: 9:35

and I'm guessing that like all your technology is built on really, really accessible API's that like people can create the UIs and the front ends within their product and tap into the data efficiency that you have, right?Yeah, yeah,

Chris Garcia: 9:47

no, no, no, I mean, amazing. No, it's funny,right? But I mean, that that's the thing is like we you know,we want to be able to seamlessly integrate to your workflows,right, specifically, your workflow. So whenever you're using today Ain't Great. Bring Your Own Device, bring your own platform, and we will seamlessly integrate and we do. Right. To get back to your question, Paul,you know, where do we see kind of that end to end? Right? I mean, like I said, literally from anywhere from, hey, I'm checking in a vehicle, a lot of actually, a lot of the interest we've seen is come in the appraisal side as well, as you can probably imagine, you know,that is a very tedious process,and in a lot of ways, right. And it's one of those things that you want to capture as much as you can quickly, for sure,right. And if you know,something as simple as, you know, a new set of tires that you've got to put on that car that drastically impacts the margin, right? It's not cheap.That's an $800 investment that you may have to make that you may not have anticipated early on. Right. And so it's one of those things where there's lots of applications and then the service ones, I think are kind of the the given, right. Yeah,obviously in a service department. There's use cases and applications. Yeah. Well,look,

Paul Daly: 10:54

it's been great learning a little bit about what you're doing. I love your energy. Thanks for Thanks for spending some time with us,Chris. It's been a pleasure pushing the ball forward for everybody. Hey, thanks.

Unknown: 11:03

Thanks for listening to the Amplify podcast brought to you by Reuters events in the city. For more engaging episodes like this, subscribe or follow on a favorite podcast platform.You can learn more about our hosts Paul J. Daly and Kyle Mountsier by visiting ASOTU.com.

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