VinFast Gets Cash Infusion, Phases of AI In Dealerships, Prompt of the Week

Paul J Daly  0:00  
Okay, after 15 minutes of straight comedy, as Kyle was trying to figure out his microphone today, we're here with the show. We have a lot of six Christmas Eve. We have a thing coming tomorrow. We have a new newsletter, and we have Vin fast we haven't talked about in quite a while. Felt like the right thing. They had that cool boat. Shipped all cars over, shipped all the cars and got swallowed up by the world, out of the world, you know, one of the fun thing, look, we've done 800 plus episodes of this show, right? And Paul J Daly, uh oh, use my middle initial.

Kyle Mountsier  0:34  
Use his middle initial and his last name. Look, the number of things that have been if people only knew right, like, it is hard to put on a show every day, right? That the thing of just building the show, knowing what stories to put in, just the regular pieces, if everything with technology goes right, just the regular piece of, like, showing up, being on, yeah, hard enough into the mood, right? All of that just being regular. But then when you compound that with, like, doing it on a trash can in an airport,

Paul J Daly  1:11  
that's funny. That's the one that came to mind, right?

Kyle Mountsier  1:15  
The whole home setup is just down. Doesn't work. Got a whole, basically road set up in your house. It's a

Paul J Daly  1:21  
whole thing. It's, it's so funny because we, Nathan and I were just on this and Kyle is just trying, and then we could hear him, but couldn't he couldn't hear us, then he could hear us, but we couldn't hear him. And we were like, oh, it'd be so savage if we were just pretending we couldn't hear him. I literally, I know, I know they took a sip of your coffee. I was like, No, we really can't hear you. And he goes,

Kyle Mountsier  1:40  
and he goes, No, we're not messing with you. I was like, See, I knew you were messing with me. It didn't work. It's unbelievable. We're here, though. We're here. We're talking about things. It's Christmas Day and Christmas Yeah, all at once, same

Paul J Daly  1:52  
time in reverse, yeah, oh no, at the same time Christmas Eve, because tomorrow is episode four, release of more than cars. We're at Mohawk Chevrolet, and it is a full out blast. We tried some new things with the edits. We have some really great interstitials in there with some eight bit video game throwbacks. It's a lot of fun. It's an amazing dealer group, and he's an amazing leader, and his team is dialed in. We can't wait to bring it all to you. And the question must be asked, Will I finally win a competition? You'll have to tune in to find out the best way to do to do that is to join us for the live stream. Just go to our LinkedIn page, ASOTU, click on Events, and then this live stream will be right there. Join us for the live stream things. There's like 500 people already on that list, and now we just have a lot of fun. We're gonna get right to the show, and then if you do miss it right, it'll be on YouTube, and it'll be places you can watch it too, but it'll be on him. Fine. Another thing, the reason is Christmas Day is because you just hit send on the brand new ASOTU published email called auto industry.ai.

Kyle Mountsier  2:53  
And it was a good one. I'm telling you one we we've just brought together some of the smartest people that we know, and said, What are you thinking? What are you challenging? How is AI going to be used? And we're just giving them a platform to talk about that that's unique and and exact for the topic. So you know what you're going to get every time you go there. It's not some broadscape news. It's about AI. It's either news or thought, opinions or whatever it may be. And then, I mean, we'll get to it at the end of the show, because there's a little spot on the prompt of the week that you can't miss. Go to auto industry.ai. And sign up for that joke. Yep,

Paul J Daly  3:29  
first one dropped today. Hey, if they sign up today, will they get today's edition? Will they get

Kyle Mountsier  3:33  
the email with a link to it? And so you, okay, yeah, you can. You can get to it. So it's not

Paul J Daly  3:37  
too late, not too late, but it's one of the it's so hard to keep up with the velocity of AI, right? So it's like, like, just kind of put together the Dream Team of DJs to curate the content for you so you don't have to, so you can keep, you know, selling cars and caring about your team all that stuff. All right, let's get into some news before Kyle's microphone goes out again. Fast. Remember them is getting another major capital infusion from its billionaire founder, fam not wrong, as well as parent company, Vin group, to aid its global expansion. So basically, Vietnam's first billionaire pledged a personal investment of $2 billion and Vin group is investing an additional $1.38 billion existing loans from Vin group to Vin fast is already valued at, oh, I don't know what the conversion there 80 trillion. Dong, what is

Kyle Mountsier  4:25  
that? How are you going to measure things in 80 trillions

Paul J Daly  4:30  
inflation? So basically, the two are pledging to continue to support Vin group through 2020, or Vin fast through 2026, to reach cash flow equilibrium is, which is what they're projecting right now. So they're looking at burning cash for at least another year and then some. He did say in June that he was willing to bet all of his money on the company's growth. I wonder how much money he has. So just another, a little sleeper, right? And this is fin fest, one that said they're gonna have a dealer network, or they do have a

Kyle Mountsier  4:58  
dealer network. Yeah. I mean, I still think there's so much money in Asia that, like, they're gonna figure out how to make this work,

Paul J Daly  5:06  
you know, S or not, right? Well, yeah. I

Kyle Mountsier  5:09  
mean, you know, the question is always going to be, what's the price point of these vehicles are, you know, tariffs and things under the new political regime going to be changing their ability to get into the US market. But I don't think they're, you know that they're not going to be worried about it for too long. When you can toss, toss around personal investments of $2 billion you're going

Paul J Daly  5:28  
to be fine and you're willing to spend all your money. Wonder how much money he has spend all he's not willing. He's not I'm telling you right now. I don't care what country you're from, you're not willing to spend all your money on a car company. I don't know, all your money. Keep that, keep that last million. I

Kyle Mountsier  5:46  
mean, keep the last million. You know, it'll be fine.

Paul J Daly  5:51  
So, so they were building a large plant in North Carolina, they put that on pause, though, didn't

Kyle Mountsier  5:56  
they, that's right, yeah, they answered that. And they had dealers lined up and the whole nine yards, and it just kind of like slow hole slowed to a halt earlier this year. I mean, if you like, comes back for an idea,

Paul J Daly  6:06  
I know, and with the tariff situation, you you have to think that the factory in the US makes all the sense, at least they've done all the groundwork, right? Yep, site selection, some site work has been done. So I don't know. I kind of like the vibe of the VIN fast people, I know scratch the CEO. No, late the thoi, right?

Kyle Mountsier  6:23  
She's traffic. $2 billion people, you know,

Paul J Daly  6:25  
cool. Like, I like the VIN fast vibes, yeah, that's good. Why I just do they had that big presser. I know. I know

Kyle Mountsier  6:32  
they always send people at nada. Like, that's strong.

Paul J Daly  6:35  
I know. Look, you know, that's true. We need to talk to some Vin fast people this year. If you know Vin fast people, if you're one of the dealers, whatever, make sure you reach out to us. Crew@asotu.com we would love to talk to some Vin pass people while we're at nada, we're going to be there in full effect again. We'll talk more about that later. But, uh, let's talk about a little bit of AI in honor of our inaugural auto industry.ai conversation. So as AI investments accounted for almost get this 40% of VC deals in q3 dealerships should be preparing for a surge in AI driven solutions, likely unfolding in three phases, according to guest contributor Steve Greenfield. So we reached out to Steve and said, Hey, you want to be a contributor to this new newsletter? He said, Yes, this was his first article. It's in today's episode. Or if you just go to auto industry.ai, you can just read the whole article, and then you can subscribe from there. Basically, he said, here are the three phases how he sees AI going to be rolling out. And he's kind of a futurist, so it's important I listen to Steve on this one phase one, he says the AI powered co pilot. And he says co pilots can double productivity by handling routine tasks, allowing employees like BDC agents to respond to twice as many leads and accelerating accounting workflows. That seems like some good ground to gain right now,

Kyle Mountsier  7:51  
maybe all the BDCs will actually respond to every lead.

Paul J Daly  7:53  
Oh my gosh, they should subscribe to our email. Phase Two, yes, too soon, the AI powered. He said, This is the next phase. Is the intelligent agent. So agents like Siri or Alexa operating independently managing tasks such as answering dealership calls, scheduling service appointments, 24/7 making a true 24/7 dealership experience possible. So that's phase two, and we see people merging into that phase three.

Kyle Mountsier  8:19  
There's already some of that in the industry, right? Numa, Auto Service, AI, Brook, things like that that are that are starting to do a bit more of that on a reactive, you know, nature. It's going to be, you know, how much proactivity happens out of AI and how much intelligence gets baked into that? Yeah,

Paul J Daly  8:36  
we'll talk about these one by one. There's too much to just take it a lot. And you know, if you pay attention to what Salesforce is doing, obviously very progressive when it comes setting the tone. Their last dream force event was all about AI agents. And these are the agents. This is what Steve is talking about here. Phase two, seeing more of these coming to automotive sales forces focusing heavily on this. I heard yesterday they're hiring 50,000 sales people,

Kyle Mountsier  9:02  
makes a ton of sense to push

Paul J Daly  9:03  
AI agents. So that's not that's not as far as you think. Phase three AI replacing roles altogether. This is autonomous AI replacing repetitive roles with human capital, making up 80% of costs in your store, dealerships might see some substantial profitability benefits while AI handles tasks once managed by people, yeah,

Kyle Mountsier  9:25  
and this is, you know, obviously there's a lot of conversation on when AGI happens, which is artificial general intelligence, which is kind of the ability for AI to really do net New curation and thinking on its own, and so that will be the point where it can go. It can extract like and read an in between the lines and start to create for itself, which is where you know replacing repetitive roles actually makes sense, because you don't have to be always prescriptive about the output. And. And, yeah, we'll see like 2025 is going to be a wild year, because the pace of, you know, the pace of AI right now is outpacing any technology in the last 15 years, for sure. So I think what's, what's weird to me, and we'll talk about this in a second, is that you've got, you know, they've, they've been talking about this kind of bell curve of AI a lot, and the bell curve is that there's, there's some super early adopters that are extremely educated on how to prompt, what to use, where to use it, how to plug into the APIs that you've got this large middle curve that's growing quickly, but it's largely uneducated and actually unable to approach AI correctly, and then you've obviously got the trailing that's just not even interested and and even utilizing AI as a co pilot for a large percentage of the population is still kind of troubling, or, Oh yeah, like, it's far off because it's it's almost hard to consume and understand how to use it at a basic day to day level, you

Paul J Daly  11:00  
know? So this is one of the reasons we made the newsletter, because the ASOTU team has been using GPT and AI since it first came out. So we are in the weeds. You're in it with your tech company. I'm in it with my agency. We're in it. The ASOTU team is probably the heaviest users of it, or, I mean, so we're constantly using it we, I mean, we're not, like, the, I don't know, in some instances, I think we are at the front of the bell curve. We

Kyle Mountsier  11:26  
are, yeah. And so maybe not when it comes to, like, utilizing the API, right?

Paul J Daly  11:30  
But yeah, so like, but all the other stuff, yes. And that doesn't mean that we're geniuses. That just means we've been doing it for 12 months, right? And which is the cool thing and encouraging thing for, I think everybody that's listening, everyone gets on the A auto industry AI newsletter, is that you can be the front runner in just six months. Just get used to it. And I think the largest component to your point, Kyle, is just understanding how you can use it. That's it. Oh, I could use AI for that. I can use it for that. It's almost like one of those video game maps when you're playing the game and the map is dark, and then you walk a little bit, and then a piece of the map opens up. You're like, oh, I can see now there's mountains there. There's an army over there. Same, same principle. So Sam Altman did say we didn't cover this in this story or in the newsletter this week, but Sam Altman is predicting that AGI will be will achieve that sometime next year, is what he thinks so. And then finally, Steve. Steve's, oh, that was it. Three phases, 123, his advice to dealership employees. Here it is, embrace AI changes and stay updated on new technologies to help your dealership thrive. One way we got

Kyle Mountsier  12:35  
you, Steve, one way you can't do that. How do you do that? Well, you get the newsletter so you can get prompts of the week like this. So speaking after the week, Oh, snap.

Paul J Daly  12:44  
Slow on that. Say it again. Say it again. Speaking

Kyle Mountsier  12:48  
of the prompt of the week, stop segway time. The technology has been tough on us. It's been tough on us, which I, AI knew they were. AI was like, we're gonna, we're gonna throw it off just because Thank

Paul J Daly  13:01  
you, Martha for subscribing in the live stream. Paul De Vries, oh man, all the way from the Netherlands, all the way from the Nether. Good to hear from my friend. Can't wait to see you next time. Alright,

Kyle Mountsier  13:09  
the prompt of the week. This is a prompt we're gonna put together based on an article or something new every single week, just to give you some way to dive in and start learning. This prompt works great in like Gemini or GPT, probably not so much perplexity, because perplexity is much more of a search engine at this point, but a great place to start. So here's the prompt. It says, Please help me develop the prompt that captures my company's unique voice tone language and energy. I want to ensure that AI Generated Content aligns with our brand's personality and connects authentically with customers, even as we enhance and streamline the process with AI to do this, ask me one question at a time until you're able to write a comprehensive brand align prompt for generating future content. Okay, let

Paul J Daly  13:54  
me just stop you right there. Yeah, let's break that down though, yes, because I think this is one of those instances where you're like, oh, I can generate a prompt like that. And the first part of generating the prompt is, help me generate a prompt. Yes, right? Yep,

Kyle Mountsier  14:09  
lead me down a conversation path, right? To do this, ask me one question at a time until you're able to complete the initial task that we stated. And this is something that AI is actually so great at. It's it's good at extrapolating and going, I need to go deeper. I actually need training and learning in order to accomplish the task that you just asked me for. Because if all you did was say, help me develop, you know, my company's tone, voice, language and energy, it's going to be, it would initially answer with just some level of tone energy, language and voice, and it wouldn't have any in any context for your brand, who you are, what you do, stuff you've written in the past, all of that. And so a prompt like this is going to lead you down a path. It's actually going to get you thinking you. And that's what I love about like, Great ai ai prompts. It actually encourages you to think more deeply in order to lead it back. It's, it's what a great assistant would do, yeah,

Paul J Daly  15:10  
and so listen, get the newsletter. Go to the website right now, because the prompt it like you can see it. You can copy it. Just copy and paste it. That's the prompt of the Week. Try. Idea is that you can copy and paste it right into your GPT instance, and then you can start to mess around with it and play with it. And then you can customize your own and then, and then, and then. But the most important thing is that you just start right? We're not talking parlor tricks. We're not talking general search. Let's start to move into that, what Steve called phase one, right? A copilot. This is a way to get a first draft on the table as fast as possible. The reason we talk about it is because the people who don't deploy this are going to be left in the dust, and the people who think about it now, even just with a little intentionality, can vastly change what your next 12 months looks like for your not and we're not even just talking about your creative team, for sure, your creative marketing team, but your service team, your sales team, your strategy team, your accounting team, like this is going to change everything. We're going to try to be here with you every step of the way and share everything we're learning curated by actual humans. Chris Reeves said, make sure you say please and thank you that way, maybe the robots will spare us when they eventually take over. We'll see you tomorrow.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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