SearchGPT Is Here, CDKs Offer To Dealers, Three Is Better Than One

Paul J Daly: 0:00

I'm back at your Monday morning, you can count them. It's July 29 means we have 123 days left. So today we're going to be talking about search. GPT cvk. Still, and three is better than one. Especially when you're talking about doughnuts and who I need. They stopped this day when they see me. Morning, Kyle, repeat me watch Kyle's outside. We're gonna see how how our internet holds.

‍Kyle Mountsier: 0:37

We're close, you can hear me? Is that case? Okay? Well, if

Paul J Daly: 0:43

you can hear me, we got a little bit of robot car. We're gonna let him catch up. But I mean, look, it's already the end of July, we have three days left. If you're in fixed ops, you only have like, two opens left, because you open this morning and you're already rockin and rollin. That's a good thing. That's a good thing. We got a lot of good things coming up. One of those things, we want to make sure you know, top of the week that we have a webinar coming up next Tuesday. So just about a week away, August 7, these are always so much fun. Just go to a soda.com Check it out. We're talking about what's been brewing with the cars rule as you have not been thinking about it. We've had a lot to think about. We've had, you know, CDK thing, and we've had summertime and we've had inventory things, but the cars rule has still been meandering its way through the through the channels me you know how it works in Washington, DC in the summer? We all do. Right? Who's actually working? I don't know. Can you hear me? No, he can. He's having a hard time. Why don't we do this? Kyle, maybe if you kill your video, we can still have audio. Or you're probably on your phone and you can't call me your phone like this is part of the fun of a live show. And what we do and how we get through. Kyle, if you at this point, just want to call me on your phone or call me on your phone. I will pass you into the show and we'll go old school. I want to do that.

Kyle Mountsier: 2:05

Can you hear me? It's common. Okay, I cannot hear you. Can you see me or hear me?

Paul J Daly: 2:10

Cow just snapped into place? Hey, yo,

Kyle Mountsier: 2:13

look at that. Am I? We all right,

Paul J Daly: 2:15

yeah, but we have. We have like Kyle coming at us, like circa year 2000 from the Middle East. And he's on like a three second delay. So we'll try to do the whole fun thing here. All right. Here we go. We're gonna just get going with the stories kind of why don't you just try to call me that way we can get some real time feedback, all that he's dialing it up. Like I posted actually so appropriate that this morning on LinkedIn, my post was this picture, which is kind of like me in the center of this big blur thing. And I was like how it feels being a content making entrepreneur. And this is so appropriate to that post this morning, because that's what it is. Everything's a blur. You're always fighting technology. But guess what, you still have to get the job done. And that's not indifferent. I mean, that's not different than what so many people in the auto industry do every day. Brian benstock posted this morning. He said, There's no such thing as an easy business. I'm tired of people whining about how it's hard. And I kind of relate to that right now. So once Kyle gets through the phone call, he's gonna get through any second here. What we're gonna do is we're going to start talking through some stories. Today we're talking about kind of an update in the CDK saga, we'll call it also talking about some product planning and how three OEMs have gotten together to make some real progress. And then finally, we're gonna talk about search GP T. A cow you with me?

Unknown: 3:38

Yeah, you are.

Paul J Daly: 3:40

Kyle, I picked up your phone call. He's still trying to fight with this technology. I know if you're still here with us by now. What we're gonna do is I'm just gonna start reading into the stories. Pick up your phone, bro. If you're watching this, this is hilarious because Kyle probably can't hear me right now. But he's looking at his phone. And I literally have him on the phone right here you can hear me right? It's great because at this point, either people are just laughing or there's no one listening. So here we are always on the phone now. All right now you get some real time. This is how we do it. Good Old Telephone. Telephone. I wish you had like the big handset so you could be like holding the telephone calls got his bag phone out there. So we're just gonna get in some storage. All right, here we go. In the latest update to the CDK saga. Many dealers are now frustrated by the DMS provider after it offered a one month rebate on software fees that dealers argued don't cover the cost of the full extent of the expenses that they incurred during the outage dealers had to rely on overtime pay for staff is coming of often. Slower deals pen and paper walk arounds temporary third party software solutions that are not CDK solutions. You know, and that resulted in as we're talking about loss, revenue loss vehicle sales, you know Further compounding the impact Scott Herbers CDKs chief revenue officer said in the statement to automotive news, quote, we appreciate and value our dealership partners and recognize the resilience they showed by continuing to conduct business throughout the outage. My team and I have personally spoken to the dealerships, and most have been very grateful and appreciative of the compensation. However, some dealers signal dissatisfaction. One of those is our friend Damon Lester, owner of Nissan a buoy saying, quote, the amount of manpower and losses that we all incurred from the expense of having to still pay people is definitely greater than one month's invoice. Judy Farkas, Sarah Parker, Sarah, CEO of headquarter automotive, echoes Rita cases, sentiments on the issue said, I would say three months would probably be closer to making up for what's happened. Damon's shared with automotive news that one month's invoices, totals at about$20,000. So kind of that's what CBK putting on the table said a lot of people are happy with that, obviously, there are a number of people saying that's not enough. So this is kind of going on back and forth as CDK tries to still kind of get their arms around everything that happened in the last six weeks.

Kyle Mountsier: 6:16

Yeah, you know, when I look at this, you know, my first gut reaction is that one month does seem a little bit light, I can't imagine trying to take one month of revenue and and put it back to customers after you just, you know, forked out millions of dollars in grants from but, but also at the same time, like most of these contracts that have SLA is for uptime. And obviously, this would have been a massive breach of SLA uptime. So I don't know what those look like on a, you know, on the side of the dealers. But typically, contracts have stuff written in for this. So I would be surprised if that's not the case here. Well, they

Paul J Daly: 6:53

did talk about, you know, in the contract as standard contract language that, you know, the parts of the business affected by a certain lane of technology, and then like derivative effects not being included in liability. And so I mean, we are kind of familiar with that, too. Like when your internet service goes down, you know, and eat, especially if you have a business, like, you know, our internet goes down here, we're media agency. So like, we can't do business, right? We can't upload, we can't live stream, we can't. But you know, the internet company is not liable for that. And they're just like, well, refract you, you're whatever. So, obviously, but there's long term contracts, there's goodwill at stake. So we'll we'll see how CDK continues to put their best foot forward to just show goodwill to the industry, saying we're trying to make things right and do better in the future. And dealers are trying to do their best to, you know, manage their business, pay their people take care of what they need to take care of. So just another little progression to this. And I'm hopeful that in the next 3060 days, right? We don't talk about this anymore, right?

Kyle Mountsier: 7:55

Me too, says everyone

Paul J Daly: 7:58

included in this story, including speaking of a whole big group of people doing stuff. This is a fun one. I love this collaboration, product planning and automotive has become very increasingly complex. Their promise transitions to EVs potential upheaval of emissions regulations, upcoming US elections, Toyota, Subaru and Mazda are working together to leverage their cooperative agreements to navigate all of this stuff together. So basically, Toyota and Subaru are launching three row Evie crossovers next year assembled in Kentucky, with batteries from Toyota North Carolina plant, which now means they qualify for the consumer tax credit of$7,500. It's great news. Subaru is enhancing its crossover lineup with Toyota's hybrid technology as well, including the new forester hybrid. Now Mazda and Toyota are working together to jointly operate in a plant already in Alabama, producing the Corolla cross and the Mazda CX 50. Mazda plans on adding also a hybrid variant of the CX 50. Using Toyota system this is so cool to see us working together, the three automakers are also working together on advanced combustion engines, straight combustion engines, potentially pushing out their full transition to EVs. Even further, Mazda has announced it will not fully launch it will not even fully launch evey products until 2028. So everyone much more measured. Yeah,

Kyle Mountsier: 9:23

I mean, this ever since both of these joint ventures were announced the Toyota Subaru and the Toyota Mazda and then now like, there's a little bit of a joint venture between all three, ever since that everybody's known that that desire is to kind of like mash up the hybrid and the hybrid technologies, the engine technologies and the all wheel drive technologies from all three companies because those who like the core things that they do better and differently than everybody else. You know, Mazda has been crushing combustion combustion engines for quite some time and Toyota with the hybrids and so when you see II You know, a the the battery technology come from Toyota the engine technology come from from from Mazda and then probably some drive train components coming from Subaru you're gonna start to see this massive mashup of vehicles and and vehicle lines that challenge the market in a whole new way yeah

Unknown: 10:21

I

Paul J Daly: 10:21

you know, I see when we when we even think about the the elements of for instance like Chinese competition coming into the US market it's really great to see a bunch of you know legacy we'll call them automakers working together to combine like all of their all their advantages to really leverage it to give the market more options and give the market better technology. So it's fun to see fun to see this like the OG saying, like roll up their sleeves, and we're like, what? Watch this. Watch this. This is how we work in the industry. It's pretty cool.

Kyle Mountsier: 10:50

Yep, speaking of bundling up technology,

Unknown: 10:53

oh my gosh, segway.

Kyle Mountsier: 10:58

Open AI has come out over the weekend and is now testing search GPT a new search function integrating AI capabilities with a real time web search to deliver quick, relevant answers with source hyperlinks. Currently, it's a new feature only available to a very limited group for testing and feedback. And the integration focuses heavily on high quality content with management options for users. At the same time, Google another Ay ay ay competitor now has recently stated that they have seen a mission surging by 48%. Since 2019, due to all of the high energy demands, making it a lot tougher for people to get to net zero by goals like 2030 that Google has. This is a direct competition to things like perplexity challenging the search market to Google having their own search capacity, and to all AI companies starting to figure out whether or not their search companies or just chat communication companies.

Paul J Daly: 11:59

I think this also bears the question, right? Like, and this is something I'm sure you and your folks are thinking a lot about Kyle. But it's like, what is the value of a website? And like right now, that hasn't changed a ton. But that value is changing very rapidly. And like how people are willing to take curated information as the information that they need to take the next step in that right because I was I was watching I think was a Gary Vee video. And he was like, how many people now search on chat GPT more than they search on Google, or at least as much. And like 60% of the hands in this room went up. Right. And we know that Google knows this already. But you know, there is a thing in my mind with GPT search. perplexity is kind of like solving it in a really interesting way. If you haven't tried it, check out perplexity, but like there's an elevated curation you and I've talked about this before that because when you search on Google, right, like your brain already starts to filter sponsored links out, but it's still nice to see sponsored links, it starts to filter out rather, and you can kind of like scroll that first page pretty quickly and absorb some information. But you know, search GPT, how they deliver it, how they deliver the hyperlinks the real time access to the web, how they're curating what it is that you see, is even more important when you're only delivering text, right, that has to be generated. So this is the beginning of a major shift and a major error in how people just find stuff that they're looking for. Yeah,

Kyle Mountsier: 13:29

I mean, the first thing that you can do is just open chat GPT, drop a page from your website on it, and ask it questions about it, and see if it can figure it out. Right? This has to do with things like semantic HTTP, HTML, or technical SEO, things that all of these AI crawlers, whether it be Bing, or Google, or the actual AI and its training model, have to learn from the web content, which is the resource that is driving so much of the answers that is given. So like you can start to figure out now whether or not your website is set up for success when it comes to understand to a large language model understanding it's read it as a resource. That's like right now thing that you can start to be tracking even in GQ without searching,

Paul J Daly: 14:15

and when you say drop your website in we mean a link doesn't matter. Yeah, a link

Kyle Mountsier: 14:19

anything about that website and just start to ask it questions about that page or the entirety of the website because it can go past just the initial page that used to date. And that's gonna tell you a lot about whether or not the content and the technical SEO structure of the website is ready to go. Well, there

Paul J Daly: 14:38

you go. We had a little bit of a bumpy tech start, but I think we ended really strong on the tech side. We gave you some practical tips to check it out. See how GPT thinks about your website. In the meantime, it's still about people

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