Car Dealers Are Losing Inventory — AI Is the Only Fix

Anthony Monteiro: The days of having a massive room full of developers and scrum teams of 10 people and review, I think, are are in the past.Theme Song: Built this week, breaking it down. Built this week, we show you how. A fresh idea, a clever tweak, you locked in true. Built this week.Sam Nadler: Hey, everyone, and welcome to Built this week, the podcast where we share what we're building, how we're building it, and what it means for the world of AI and startups. I'm Sam Nadler, cofounder here at Rise Labs, and each and every week, I'm joined by my friend, business partner, and cohost Jordan Metzner. And this week, we have a special guest, Anthony, from AutoAcquire AI. Anthony, if you don't mind, please introduce yourself and tell us a tiny bit about AutoAcquire AI.Anthony Monteiro: Sure. Hey. Anthony Montero, CEO and founder of AutoAcquire AI. AutoAcquire is a tool that we built specifically for car dealers that can buy a car directly from a consumer. I think I think a lot of people are familiar with Carvana and and their advertisement that they that they see on TV all the time where the I think it's Kristen Bell is sitting there, she's going, hold it.Hold it. And her husband's cutting the grass, and she's like, you know, he's like, sell it. She's like, no. We need to hold it. So we've created a tool like that for for your everyday car dealer, small, medium, large.You don't have to be that big mega Carvana dealership organization to buy a car directly from a consumer because it really is kinda clunky, and there's a lot of pieces to it. So we tried to smooth it out. We tried to make it a really easy process for both our customer who's who's the dealer user and and then that customer that just wants to get a check and have someone come pick their car up out of their driveway so they can maybe go buy another one.Sam Nadler: Amazing. This is super top of mind for me. I'm actually selling two cars this week, so excited to learn more. With that in mind, Jordan, we built something with AutoAcquire in mind. Give us the quick demo.Jordan Metzner: Yeah. So it was really great to meet earlier this week with Anthony and Chris. Awesome to hear the story about AutoAcquire and some of its features and tool sets. So based on that, I did a little vibe coding, mostly front end type tool, which, you know, based on your feedback was like a messaging bus. So I'd like to show that to you now.So essentially, what you do is you have some type of event. In this case, it's a webhook. So you can customize it. Basically, someone fills out a web form. So once they fill out a web form, then we send it over to AI, and we do some analysis.So, you know, kind of what is the person's intent by their form. If we have a high confidence score, then we'll actually score it and then send them an SMS, like, hey, you know, why don't you come on by or something like that based on a template type system. And if we have low confidence score, then we might do something like an email drip campaign if we realize, like, maybe the candidate isn't, you know, optimal to maybe buy a vehicle at this time. And then, obviously, you know, all of this is kind of totally customizable. You can edit each of these parts of these flows, of, you know, if this case you wanted the confidence score to be 90, etcetera, and then, you can, edit all these templates.And I'll show you a quick example of what this looks like. What you'll do is you'll execute the flow. And so here we have the webhook, the analysis, the text, and then here, it looks like my CSS is a little off. But he says, is the twenty twenty one f 150 still available? Hi, Alex.Yes. The f one fifty is still available. It's on a lot now. Would you like to schedule a test drive? And so, you know, this message is just completely automated directly based on kind of the web form, the intent analysis, and then the scoring, and then send off that SMS automatically.So, yeah, that's that's what I built for you guys, Anthony. I would love to hear some feedback what you think.Anthony Monteiro: I I think it's awesome.Theme Song: I love the fact, you know, people using Vibe in in other AI type generative platforms today has changed the game for us. Right?Anthony Monteiro: I've been I've been doing this stuff since, I don't know, 30, I guess. And the days of having a massive room full of developers and scrum teams of 10 people and review and peer reviews and all of the things that really slow down code development, I think, are are in the past. Now that's not to say that it's completely gone and we don't need humans that are gonna prompt these these engines and or when the code gets generated, that has to be tested and connect to all the other APIs and fun things that we do as we build software. But, you know, super cool. And it can you could easily, I'm sure, take this into anything.Right? Instead of, hey. Is the is the v f one fifty available? It would be is your 2021 Porsche Cayenne still available, and would you like to sell it to us? Right?Mhmm. Here's an offer. I'll pay you cash today and just kinda work that, build this work flow down a a intelligent conversation path via text with the customer, and it doesn't tie up staff.Jordan Metzner: Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, I just built a basic format, but, you know, you could probably include this analysis later on down the pipeline again. Right? So you're kind of keep analyzing the conversation, decide, you know, hey, do I keep responding back with SMS?Maybe I should call the person or even maybe bridge a phone call where you maybe call the dealer first and then have the bridge call the customer and say, hey, this is Johnny. You know, you could even payload the data to the dealer side. So, you know, his phone rings. He knows it's auto acquired. He picks it up, and he's like, hey, Johnny's got a f one fifty to sell.You know, just try to get him down to the dealership. And then Johnny picks up the phone, and then, you know, they can kind of bridge bridge that relationship. So this was just a simple easy one. But what I like about the interface is I think it's it's very easily understood by a non technical user.Theme Song: Mhmm.Jordan Metzner: And I think this is is is is cool because dealers inherently are non technical users, and so, you know, they may say, hey, you know what? This SMS template, like, it's it's not converting that well. Maybe we should, you know, change out this template to a different template to see if we get better conversion or maybe AB test or, hey, know, sending them a text when they have high intent is not as good as just calling them on the phone. You know, maybe we wanna change this to a phone call example. So, you know, I think dealerships can start to learn, and obviously, with your software understanding success rates, like, you know, which flows are working the best, you might be able to to do some analysis to see, you know, how to optimize these flows for each dealer kind of thing.Because to your to your point, Anthony, you know, these dealerships are some some are small, some are large, some are in, you know, small, you know, Midwestern towns, and some are in, you know, large, you know, metropolitan cities. And I'm guessing that based on these geolocations, their their customers have, you know, completely just different behavior. You know, small dealership in a small town, you're kind of looking for a phone call versus a text, you know, big dealership, big city, maybe a text is, like, more appropriate, for example, in, like, Manhattan or something.Anthony Monteiro: Yeah. And it it's also very dependent upon their staffing configuration and their organizational operations. Right? I might I might have a big BDC where I have a bunch of agents that I can dump these calls into or soft hand off the call to maybe somebody that got engaged, or I might not be able to do that. So I'll need a a voice AI agent to go out and start making those calls and get the customer further in the funnel because I could probably ask some more questions.Right? I could get into if the customer says, hey. Yeah. I might be interested in that. Excellent.You know, what kind of condition is the exterior and give them some prompts. Good, fair, excellent, poor. How about the interior? And then just really capture data through these tools versus typically what the the status quo is, send the customer somewhere to do something. Right?Fill out a form, enter in information, press a button, wait for somebody to call them, email them, or do something. They're wanting immediate ratification. What's my car worth? I wanted I don't want to wait for somebody to call me with that number. Just show it to me right now, even if it's in that same text communication.Build an API that can give them the price and deliver it while they're engaged instead of having the biggest thing is you guys know, everybody knows, is the engagement. Once I have someone engaged, I wanna let them go. Right? So we we engage them, then we go, okay. Well, wait a minute.We'll get back to you. Right?Sam Nadler: Yeah. Which, you know, I mentioned I'm selling two cars this week. I'm probably it's the same exact thing happened to me. I'm waiting to trigger my CarMax and Carvana prices, but I reached out to my dealer, and he said he was gonna give me a price, waited for about an hour. Twenty four hours later, still haven't received anything.At this point, you know, there's still time left in my own personal timeline to, like, consider what they may offer me. But, you know, for the most part, I've kinda moved on from them as an option just because they didn't respond quickly enough.Anthony Monteiro: Well, first of all, it's it's almost shocking. Right? I've like I said, I've been doing this for a long time. How do I not give you an instant price on my website? Like, why do I need to have a human do that part of this?It's math. It's algorithmic. The values are available in databases across multiple different layers of information. And the and the variation between an excellent and poor is is great, but it typically falls somewhere in the middle, so it's easy with with AI to smooth it all out. Right?How your car is really not gonna I can just ask you a few questions, and then AI can tell by even your tone if you're answering the question. If I say, hey. Is your car excellent or poor? And you go, excellent. Well, I'm gonna move it more to average.Right? Because if it's excellent, you're gonna say excellent. If it's poor, you're gonna go, yeah. My car is kinda beat up a little bit. Right?I use it as a work vehicle.Sam Nadler: Yeah. And it's all dependent on a inspection anyway. So you just wanna, like, be you that speed to get them enticed and, I guess, show simplicity is what I'm looking for as a A thousand percent. Potential seller.Anthony Monteiro: Yeah. Like, if you if you got your CarMax price and Carvana price, you had no humans involved in that process. You answered some questions, maybe a little bit more than, you know, a quick one, but they showed you what the price is that they're they're going to pay you subject to, like you said, an inspection. What we did what's what's pretty cool is if your dealer was a customer of ours, you would've went on the website and filled out the the form, the questions. Right?And it would've instantly given you a certificate with your offer. And then in that certificate with your offer, there's a link to launch an inspection. So while you're on your phone, it says, hey. Go stand in front of your car, and it and it, like, depositing a check. Says, stand in the front.Click. Go to the driver's side. Click. And it poses the user or the seller around the car, takes 14 pictures of the exterior, four of the interior, so we capture the dashboard, so we see the odometer. And then computer vision AI zooms in, and it looks for dense scratches, dings, tears in the seats.So all of these things, it does an analysis. So now the consumer is more engaged. Right? I know that you took ten minutes out of your day to go do that, but as a buyer, I have all that information. I don't have to wait for you to come in and do this inspection because the next thing that dealer's gonna say is, hey, Sam, when can you get down here?That's gonna be your next move. Right? You're gonna go, well, I don't know, man. I'm kinda busy, and you're thirty minutes away, and by the time you Carvana's gonna go, I'm gonna put the money in your checking account. My car and truck will be there on Thursday at 03:00 to pick it up.Which one of you can go?Sam Nadler: Okay. So that's perfect segue. Let's you you're an industry veteran, thirty years. What, you know, insights over your career led you to launch AutoAcquire? What was the biggest pain point?We've touched upon it a little bit, but let's transition specifically into your product.Anthony Monteiro: Yeah. You know, I I've seen a lot of of different businesses and and niches in this space of building software for car dealers. There's there's so many companies out there trying to do everything all the time, and they end up only doing some of it, you know, okay. You know, when you look at this this demand in the used car market that it's really hard to go to auctions now and buy cars because the big guys, the CarMax's, the Carvana's, the Lithia's, the Sonix, they all go and they have teams of buyers, and they just buy they buy all the stuff that's at the auction. So it's really hard for your average dealer to go in and raise their hand and buy a car that's that's at a reasonable price.And then you got auction fees and transportation fees, you have all these things that add up. So now you go try to recondition and sell the car, your margins are super, super compressed. So we said, let's find vehicles that that our dealers literally have in the customer's driveways. Most of these dealers have 20,000, 40,000, 50,000 customers in their database, so why not just keep reaching out to them? I need to buy five f one fifties.Well, I have a database of customers who have, let me see, 22,000 f one fifties in the ownership database. Let me reach out to them and ask just simply ask them, do you wanna do you wanna sell it? And and put a price on it right out of the gate. We don't even have them go through the steps. We'll just put a price on it, and just think, in your scenario, if you had gotten an email two or three months ago or a month ago saying, hey.I want to what are what are you trying to sell or get rid of?Sam Nadler: Pathfinder and the rogue.Anthony Monteiro: Okay. So imagine receiving an email or a text message from that dealer a couple months ago saying, hey, Sam, I'd love to buy your Pathfinder and your Rogue, and here's how much I'll give you. All you do is push this button. Right? Yeah.It would be great. Deal with them would have been done by now. They would have acquired both of those vehicles. You wouldn't even have gone to CarMax or Carvana. So now what these dealers have done is they put themselves in a really bad scenario.You're gonna go to CarMax or Carvana and sell your car, and they're gonna lose that trade, and they're gonna be in this downward spiral of I can't get inventory, people aren't trading cars with me because they don't they're not giving the consumer the option to do it really easy, and they're not in the game. They're not in the game. That's the problem. Yeah. Just puts them in the game.That's awesome. And, youJordan Metzner: know, just a quick question before we jump into the news a little bit. You know, maybe all of this wasn't possible without AI, or maybe AI has, you know, facilitated a lot of significant improvements. Obviously, AI is in the name of the company as well. But it'd be great to hear just a little bit about how, you know, some AI has enabled some, you know, product development features technology that probably wasn't able to be generated before AI existed or before the ability to, like, access these LLMs. I think that, you know, computer vision's been around for years, reading a license plate, that kind of basic y stuff.You know, I'd love to hear a little bit about just how AI has had, like, a major impact on the business.Anthony Monteiro: Sure. You know, it's it's funny. Sometimes I almost wanna take AI out of the name. Right?Sam Nadler: BecauseAnthony Monteiro: everybody, oh, I'm AI. I'm AI, and and realistically, most aren't. There's some sort of a application that they sit on top of their old legacy stuff and and build and say they're an AI company. You know, we started from from scratch going into it. My last venture with a with a startup, we had to lean into AI really heavily because we built a logistics platform of picking and dropping off vehicles and to determine how long it takes to go from point a to point b, and each driver had different characteristics and traffic patterns and time of day and all of these things, AI had to really maximize it or else you would never be able to rendezvous the two endpoints, the a to b, and get the driver to another another place.Similar to, you know, what DoorDash and and all these other Ubers do. Right? They they maximize. They have AI figure out where's the next and closest place that this driver can go to. And so we we had to lean into it way before the the LLM models that are out there today, but it it got us comfortable with, hey.This is gonna be something that's really gonna help us. The automobile industry and especially what we do with vehicle values, it's very structured data. It's structured. Right? There's a year, make, model, trim, color, options, mileage, right, service dates.There's all these really finite points of data that machine learning loves. Right? It it it doesn't have to go out to this sprawled place of LLMs and try to pull it back. It's like, okay. I have everything right here.I can like, I've already did the math upfront. Now what do you want me to do? So we were able to take, like, the structured data, and then now go out and be able to see every single vehicle that's listed online for sale, and build algorithms using AI of what's the real value of a of a vehicle today, right now in that market. Not waiting for the auction data, not waiting for some feed to come in that's normally lagging, and and who knows what the vehicle values. It could change in a minute.Right? Like, there could be some news that completely blows up the value of a car because something happened or something changed it, some economic thing. Well, those happen in real time, and if you can utilize it in real time, then that that number is so accurate. You can't do it without it. You just can't, because you can't process that much information without being able to use AI.Jordan Metzner: Alright. Well, that's I mean, that's obviously a great overview of the business, and it seems like the upside is obviously in your favor as these are kind of historically nontechnical businesses implementing tech technology. So it seems like there's a big upside here. Maybe this is a great pivot to jump into the news, Sam.Sam Nadler: Sure. Yeah. Let's, I tried to choose a few auto industry focused articles. First one up is about Waymo. Waymo raising 15,000,000,000 in new funding and evaluation of a 110,000,000,000.Part of the reason why I chose this outside that you come from the auto industry, Anthony, is because last week, I took my first Waymo. It was a pretty magical experience, and, you know, it it leads one to believe how quickly most cars will be autonomous and over what time period. But, yeah, just any thoughts on Waymo in general and this new new funding announcement?Anthony Monteiro: I personally think it's crazy that Waymo could raise that much money on that model. Not that the model's not good, but to build a Waymo vehicle, you need a massive investment on putting the vehicle together. So the number of cameras that they use and the type of cameras that they use and the LiDARs that they use are far more costly than Tesla's version. Right? So Tesla can put the same technology out with a self driving Tesla taxi.I forget what they call it.Jordan Metzner: It's a Robotaxi. Yeah.Anthony Monteiro: Robotaxi. For a third of the price. Right? So the the cost of the vehicle and you have a manufacturer in Tesla that not only manufactures the vehicle, but already has the driving data from all of the consumers driving the car. So their data collection of being accurate, of being able to be safe in capturing all of the imagery around them compared to what Waymo has, I don't I don't get it because I I don't know, You man.Gotta go buy some Jaguars and build them all and then and then deploy them when you literally can get a Tesla in a couple weeks and create a whole fleet that's already built to do this.Jordan Metzner: Well, I I don't I don't highly disagree with you, but I'll I'll push back on a few points just Okay. Devil's advocate here. So I'm a Tesla owner. I just returned my lease and flipped it. I had a Tesla FSD 14.2.It was incredible. I had it for about a week. I returned my Tesla. I got a new Tesla. I don't have 14.2, so it definitely feels like a regression until they, like, push it back to me.And I saw Tesla launched Robotaxi in Austin, like, the first driverless version. It does seem that Tesla has a huge opportunity here if they're able to find full autonomy with a camera only system, especially because of how many vehicles they have deployed in the marketplace, ignoring their data and all those other things. I mean, I have a car parked in my park in my driveway. I'm I go on vacation. I turn it onto the network, or I'm not using it that day, and the vehicle goes from, you know, a cost center to to a revenue generator.I think in the case of TESS, I think in the case of Waymo, I would say two things. One is the fact that the vehicle costs, I I believe I saw this morning, Chamath said, about a 150 k versus Tesla's 25 k. So, you know, in that math, we're locking talking six x. Right? Six or eight x?Yeah. And so, you know, I think that is questionable. But if they put this technology on a cheaper vehicle, obviously, Jaguar is an expensive vehicle. So, you know, if they move to a cheaper vehicle type, you know, what is the true cost of that? You know, what of the true LiDAR hardware is going to get reduced or not necessary?Is Waymo, which is backed by Google, going to figure out using computer vision and, you know, catch up to this type of Tesla technology? And, you know, I think my last question or comment overall about all of this, and I think this is what I said to Sam last week with 14.2, is to me, it seems most obvious that Tesla will license the software to every other auto manufacturer. And selling Tesla FSD in a hardware software kit to manufacturers seems to me like the most probable path for multiple reasons, because it seems impossible Tesla will ever be able to produce the volume of the amount of vehicles needed in The United States. They'll never be able to have the vehicle diversity to meet to meet that. And since customers like it so much, it just seems so obvious that Tesla could sell manufacturers an eight kit, you know, camera kit plus a piece of hardware that puts in the trunk.And when you go to lease you go to lease or buy a car, you can buy it with FSD or without FSD. And, you know, you're just paying, you know, to the dealer. You're paying Honda. You're paying Toyota. Toyota is paying Tesla.And it just seems obvious that these, you know, giant manufacturers are never gonna be able to stand up a laboratory that will compete against this. And so that also may, you know, double down Tesla's ability to be excellent here. I'm sure Waymo would probably try the same type of behavior, but as you mentioned, you know, this additional hardware is still limiting in the ability to kind of scale.Anthony Monteiro: Yeah. It's it's hardware that you can't well, you can, but the manufacturer, it's much harder to just put that in the assembly line and come out the pipe with a bunch of cameras in your mirrors and bumpers and places versus adding on these big, you know, clunky, as you can see, the big rotary thing on the top that looks really crazy. But listen. I wish I could go raise that kind of money or maybe, like, an eighth of it or a sixteenth. I'd be really happy.But, you know, god god bless them, and Yeah. You know, if it works, it works. Everybody's got a dream and a model, and, you know, Google's a big player, and they own the map, you know, world. So, you know, who knows? I just I truly feel watching Tesla and knowing Elon Musk that that space is probably gonna be dominated by a test like you said.It once it goes into Fords and Chevys and Toyotas and Hondas, then it's game over because I could build the fleet of of taxis with any brand just with software at that point.Sam Nadler: Honda Civic, Prius, whatever.Jordan Metzner: Well, even more so, just like all the other vehicles that Tesla doesn't manufacture that are required. I mean, f one fifty is the most popular vehicle in The United States, and, you know, the Cybertruck competes with it in some sense, but but not necessarily a replacement vehicle. Look at Sprinter vans. I mean, look at, you know, the two door sedans. You know, even things like motorcycles can can move to FSD.Right? And so we just have full auto driving on motorcycles. So, anyway, it sounds super exciting. Let's jump into the Tesla news.Sam Nadler: Yeah. And, you know, I thought, again, auto industry focus. I'm not sure how big news this is, but, you know, Tesla supposedly has engaged in, marketing, deceptive marketing for the full self driving. I I partly chose this because Jordan is is so bullish on Tesla and so bullish on full self driving. I'm just curious to hear his reaction.But, yeah, I mean, I've experienced it myself. It's it's quite impressive. But, you know, any immediate thoughts on full self driving and, you know, is this is there any here, here, I guess, I should say?Jordan Metzner: Yeah. My 2¢ is just Elon's a great marketer, and he's been calling it FSD and full self driving for years when it's not full self driving. I mean, it's pretty obvious. Right? Full self driving means the car is fully self driving.So to this date, I don't think they've even launched what I would consider, like, full self driving. Right? That means I can, like, close my eyes and go to sleep type of thing. Alright? In in a Waymo, I'm not even sitting in the driver's seat.So until I can sit in another seat in the vehicle, I wouldn't say it's full self driving. But I think that's part of been, you know, Elon's been selling FSD for years. Right? He sold it as this like big package and then he moved to a licensing model. And I can understand why states are pretty mad at his kind of, quote, false advertising here around it.I think, like I don't know. I mean, this seems like more of a civil matter. Like, consumers would probably have aAnthony Monteiro: class action lawsuit against Tesla saying that, like, they misrepresented what their full self driving is rather than coming from the state, but, you know, it is what it is. But, yeah, curious what you think, Anthony. It's definitely a bit of a a false advertisement. You know? It's it's wording, and it says full, and it's not.Right? It's it's augmented. It's assisted. There's a lot of different words you can use other than full. But you know what?He's he's Elon, and he's gonna push the limits on everything. And if he gets slapped with a $100,000,000 lawsuit because he used the wrong words, he really doesn't care. Right? So he's gonna he's gonna keep doing what he does, and it might force them to make a little bit of a change, but he's they're just gonna continue to get better at at everything that they do around this space. And, you know, we will be able to sit in other seats in their cars, and it's not far away.Jordan Metzner: Yeah. That's so exciting. I mean, I think like Sam said at the beginning, the Waymo was such a life changing experience. FSD 14.2 was pretty life changing for me, and I mean, I'm guessing that they're holding 15 out for a, you know, life changing kind of, like, next level experience. But I'm glad these guys are fighting it out, though.That's for sure.Anthony Monteiro: Yeah. I mean, listen, the competition makes for better. Right? And the they'll definitely fight it out, and and and there'll probably be more than one winner. You know?Uber and Lyft fought it out for a while. Uber, I believe, came out way on top, and, you know, it just is what it is. But, you know, Lyft still lives for another day, and and they have a they have some market. And sometimes you only need some to be happy. Right?Yeah. Totally.Sam Nadler: Awesome. Well, let's wrap. Thank you, Anthony. It was it was great to hear about AutoAcquire AI. Thank you for joining us, and it was a pleasure.Anthony Monteiro: Yeah. Same. Same. Same. You guys are fun.Jordan Metzner: Thanks, Anthony. I wanna say thanks again for joining us on Built This Week. Everyone can check out Auto Acquire AI online, and you can like and subscribe to Built This Week on YouTube or any of your favorite podcasting platforms. Thanks, everyone, and see you next week.Sam Nadler: Thank you.Theme Song: Built this week, breaking it down. Built this week, we show you how. A fresh idea, a clever tweak you locked in. You built this week.