Good morning and welcome to today's webinar. Our moderator today is Rob Saik, founder and CEO of visorPro. Before I turn it over to Rob, I'd like to let those of you who are live with us know that you may submit questions during the webinar via the Q&A tab at the bottom of the screen. This webinar will also be recorded so that you may watch or re-watch On Demand at your convenience. With that, I turn it over to Rob. Well, thanks everybody for joining. It's a real pleasure for us to be with AED. We have a very, very good webinar for you today discussing AI and strategies for your business. Brion Torgerson is with us. He's the CEO of Torgerson Equipment. They're into construction, they're in agriculture, they're in Montana and Wyoming. They got a rental side of the business. He's an advocate for agriculture. Wayne Fischer is with Torgerson's for 25 years now, so he knows a lot of the stuff about the workings of Torgerson. Comes from a farming background in North Dakota, crops and livestock. Just been with the business a long, long time. We've got Brock Moir. Brock is our Chief Product Officer with visorPro and Brock's got a background in AI through the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, and he's worked with lots of big companies through that organization and privately, including Microsoft and Climate FieldView and other organizations. John Schmeiser is with us and John has got a 28-year veteran as Chief Operating Officer, President with the North American Equipment Dealers Association, and John plays a role with us now with Pfizer Pro on industry relations and dealer relations. So it's great to have the four of you guys as panelists. My role is moderator. If you have questions, throw them into the question section and I'll try to get to them either at the end or appropriately during the middle of the conference. Today's webinar is about AI strategies for your business. Adopt your left behind. I believe that AI is moving fast and either businesses will get on this thing and figure it out or not. Efficiency, ownership of data, labor and training solutions, leveraging AI to help you out with that, knowledge retention, and real-world insights from Torgesons. There are going to be three terminologies that will come up. One is the vault, which is the data integrity. The second one is the brain, which is the experiential knowledge and wisdom of the dealership and the business capturing that inside the vault. The last one is asset. How do we turn your team into a digital asset? So vault, brain, and asset. With visorPro, it is a portal where you can access all of your equipment lines. So Brock, let's begin with you. Let's talk a little bit about what is AI? What is general AI? What is this all about? Where is it moving? Yeah. So I've been working with AI for a number of years. With generative AI, where these large language models are going is quite interesting. It's never been easier to leverage AI in your operations to find all kinds of efficiencies. In the next five years, I think we're going to see a lot of generative AI solutions come out that are very impactful for almost every business, whether that's in agriculture or construction or beyond. With the advent of these tools, you're going to find a lot of opportunities to scale your customer relationships, to leverage the knowledge and interact with the knowledge of your institution in new ways, in better ways than you could before, and also find ways to retain the knowledge of your senior people and use that and leverage it in ways to level up the rest of the people in your organizations. This is going to go well beyond the equipment space, but we're very focused in the equipment side. I think there's never been a bigger opportunity to leverage AI than there is today, and there will be in the next few years. Right on. Well, thanks. This sets it that this is a fast-moving area. We started as an organization developing VisorPro. We've referred to her as Vi. We started developing VisorPro in 20, well, I guess, ChatGPD dropped in November 22. 23, we started developing it. Torgeson's Young's Equipment and Maser Group were some of our pioneers working with us on the pilot. Brion and I go way back, and Brion, one of the things I wanted to get you to talk about is why? Why did you do this with us, and why are you interested in what you're seeing with AI, Brion? Thanks, Rob. Appreciate the question. The why and what we are doing with VisorPro, it really comes down to two things. One, we want to grow our people, and two, we feel like we can manufacture time for our people. I'll talk about those two items. Let's focus with technicians. Primary objective is with technicians. We can grow our technicians from a C-tech to an A-tech much, much faster. We can take an A-tech and make him much more efficient. As we grow our technicians, we all know technicians are tough. They're tough to come by. What we're finding today is we're hiring technicians that do not come from the industry. We're going to high schools. We're scholarship and kids as juniors and seniors in high school. They go to a technical school. They come back to us in nine months, in two years, in four years. We can take visorPro and spool these young technicians up fast. That's the key. Because we can spool them up fast with visorPro, the confidence in a young technician that may not be from the industry grows leaps and bounds because they're technology kids. They get this stuff. When we talk about manufacturing time, we focus on the A-tech. You take an A-tech, can we get him to two more jobs a day? Can we get him to one more job a day? Look at what field techs do. We're traveling 120 miles one direction oftentimes. If we can get to one more customer in a day and keep that customer going, that's powerful. We look at two things. How do we grow our people? Also, we can manufacture time with our people. Primary objective is technicians. But further in the conversation, we'll discuss how do we take this and move this into parts people, into sales people, even into an internal perspective of SOPs and processes that we can use the vault in. I'll leave it at that for a moment, but that's why we're doing it. Two things, grow people, manufacture time. That's perfect. John, you've been with the industry for a long, long time. You joined our organization and we're grateful for that. What do you see with visorPro and why do you think it's valuable for equipment dealerships and OEMs? Well, thank you, Rob, and thanks for the opportunity to be part of the panel. Good morning, everybody. In my experience, Rob, I've seen that dealers have become so busy in the business that they're not able to spend a lot of time working on the business. I think one of the challenges out there to equipment dealers for continued success is to look at new and innovative things as they spend time and dedicate time to working on the business. And that's where artificial intelligence or AI comes into it. I remember back in the day, we would do surveys about workforce development challenges. And one of the surveys that we did was on the technician shortage. And Brion spoke rather eloquently about how our technicians are pressed for time. And with the volume of work that is out there, our surveys were telling us that each dealership location would add another two and a half technicians without building any extra capacity. They would add an extra two and a half technicians per location if they could find that person. So our technicians are under a lot of stress to get the work done in a timely manner. And that's affecting the dealership's absorption rate and the efficiencies. Historically, the equipment industry has been behind the automotive industry when it comes to the absorption rates or technician and service efficiency. And that's, I think, a good reason why dealers should look at AI tools to increase the efficiency in that very important department of the dealership. So that brings the question, like, what areas or how do we look at AI to drive that efficiency in the dealership? And as Brian also stated, I'll just add on to that. He's talking about training and bringing his technicians up to speed. But I also believe that that reduces frustrations as well, not only with the technicians, but with the customer. And I think there's a misconception out there that adopting new technologies is a very laborious and difficult task within the dealership. And to me, AI seems to be the opposite. It seems to be a very easy integration that layers over the dealer's equipment, current processes and efficiencies. And I would encourage dealers not to rule out looking at AI because of that misconception. In our experience, working with the dealers that are using by right now, they've shared with us that it has been a very easy integration process. And I think keep that in mind when you look at how AI is going to potentially help your dealership. So thanks, Rob, and thanks for the opportunity to be on the panel. A great segue into the how. So when we start working with the dealership, we'll typically have a decision maker like Brian have to come to a decision about it. But generally, we end up working with the staff, like with Wayne Fisher and the service department people. And the idea here is to work with them. And we take the load off their shoulders. We help to build the vault for them. The vault is very important because that's the secure location where the dealership and only the dealership has access to the data that we're leveraging for the benefit of the dealer. Wayne, can you talk a little bit about your experience as to how we've been integrating visorPro inside of Torgeson's system? Absolutely. And thank you, Rob. And it's an honor to be part of this discussion. One of the true beauties of visorPro and being part of the implementation of this was the ease on our part. We started out with weekly calls with Brock and Wilson. And basically, we set direction. And we said, OK, here's a whiteboard. This is what we would like to see. Brock and Wilson would go back behind the scenes, make things happen, come back. And we would develop. And we built it as we went. Everyone on our team that was part of that was amazed at the speed of which we got changes made and how fast we progressed. And again, I think one of the things Brion and John both touched on is it's not just the efficiency of those top techs, but it's removing the frustration from our early techs or our young techs. And again, for us, the thing that made this simple and the how was a lot of our OEMs are in our vault. I'm sure other OEMs are going to come out with their own AI solution. But we carry multiple brands. And again, all of those tools are now within one spot. So again, to Brion's point on making even our best techs better, our service writers, service managers don't have to pick up the phone and call that top tier tech on asking a question. It's right there in visorPro. And so that's where we're not just manufacturing time, we're manufacturing efficiency and we're removing frustration. And so again, back to what Brock and Wilson have done for us. These were the conversations we had early on of, okay, this is where we see it going. This is where we need help. And it's been very fluid, very fast paced and well thought out process. One of the things about visorPro, it's an enterprise solution. So whether it's Rachel Receptionist or Dealer Dan or Technician Terry or Pete the Partsman, everybody has access to it. And Wayne, I'm going to go back to you here. There was a story about one of your people using visorPro and helping a customer understand that maybe they should work with the dealership on getting the repair done. Can you just talk about that anecdote? Well, yes. I mean, it's one of those things where just like with hiring techs is always a challenge, right? Hiring experienced service writers and service managers has the same challenges. So now the service writer knows what questions to ask. And again, doesn't need to be an expert, but at least gives an example of, okay, what should I be asking this customer? And to be honest with you, what is this customer even talking about, right? Because we carry such a wide vance of equipment and there's so many models within each of these brands that it takes two years to get spooled up. It makes us look much smarter to the customer base. And again, the more professionally we can come off to our customers, the more business that's going to bring in. Well, it's professional. It's like I use the example all the time. You get the question about what is the engine oil capacity, the type and the change interval. And a customer, if you can answer that question while we're on the phone at the same time by using visorPro and Vi gives you the answer, you look smart and you save a bunch of time. Brock, can you talk a little bit about the procedure, about how people get, when you're considering getting into AI. John, you said it wasn't as complicated and Wayne just said it was the easy process. Can you talk to us a little bit, Brock, about that engagement on the front end and how we build the vault and how we move into the brain? Yeah. So in terms of how we build the vault, it's mostly working with whichever dealership we're working with, our customer, we're working with Torgeson's or one of our other customers to identify which OEMs to prioritize to get into the vault. Some of the equipment, it's not as information heavy as others, but there is usually a lot of lines that they carry that having this information at their fingertips is quite valuable. So we work with them to identify those. We work with them to get access to those OEM portals and then we pull that information into the vault on their behalf. So we'll populate the vault as a result of that. The process from we want to work with you to now we have a vault that's functioning, takes a couple of weeks. It's not a long drawn out process. Some OEMs might take a little bit longer beyond that, but most of the vault will be there after the first couple of weeks. In terms of moving into the dealer brain, this is really interesting. So what we've learned by working with our customers is there's a lot of institutional knowledge inside of these dealerships. There's business systems that have all kinds of history about work that's been done, including what parts were used on those things, what labor hours went into it, and some stories around how that work was done. And right now today, people in dealerships trying to find past work, it's a lot driven by memory and maybe keyword searching. In these business systems, there is a ton of information. And so as we move into the dealer brain, we're really targeting this institutional knowledge that the dealer's already created to populate more of the vault and to build that brain. So now they have an asset within visorPro to leverage more in the future after every job that they do. Beyond that, I'm looking at what's in the heads of their senior people and how do we get that into visorPro. It's another area that's really, really important. It's really hard sometimes to keep these senior people around past retirement. A lot of them are getting older, getting worn out from the industry and starting to move on. So how do you keep their knowledge inside of your dealership after them being there for 20, 30 years? So there's a lot of opportunities with AI to leverage that kind of information as well. And we're just starting to scratch the surface on how we can bring that into visorPro and how we can make that into a new asset for the dealerships to leverage into the future. So Brion, as you listen to this, this part totally unscripted, we're just going to roll with conversation. But as you're listening to Brock there, how excited do you get about thinking about capturing the institutional knowledge of your people? Because whether it's technician Terry or service Sam, if that person walks out the door, that's a bad day. So as you were listening to Brock here, what's going through your mind as a kind of principle of the business? When we first got into visorPro, we jumped into it from a technician perspective only. Well, as Brock said, we're scratching the surface. I'm super excited to even consider what is the potential and what's the future that we can do. When you start looking at uploading ops manuals, when you start looking at the parts information, the technology, machine control, precision, it's super exciting. You start looking at our own internal SOPs and processes, uploading that into the vault. Now we're creating an internal solution just as much as an external solution for all of our processes and giving access to our people in the leadership, and they know they can type in, get an answer that fast, it's tremendous. I can't wait. In fact, the world's our oyster. We have a blank canvas, and we're going to become Picasso artists once we can get this really infiltrated with our entire leadership. Yes, we're starting from technician perspective, absolutely. But there is so much more power to this as we continue to grow as a leadership. Again, we've talked about frustrations. I won't go into that, eliminating that with our people. But yet to me, it's all about being efficient and being lean as we continue to grow in both the ag and construction market. When you're running a rental business, how many product lines would you have, Brion, inside of your business? Well, product lines, we're probably managing 25-30 product lines. But in addition to that, throw attachments in there. You can have multiple attachments. We're just starting to look at how do we have this attachment in the AI atmosphere? Because there's so many questions, and we have people that just aren't the experts. They don't have the seat in the chair for experience. Well, now we can take people, maybe not have the experience, but we can bolt on visorPro as just another brain for them, another mentor. We're looking at visorPro really as a mentor for some of these people in getting questions back to a customer much faster, or customers across the desk, or on the phone call, you can type in and you're getting information back to a customer. Yes, we talk about internal massive advantages. At the end of the day, it's all about the customer. When we focus on the customer, looking at tools like visorPro, it makes it really easy to invest time, what is technology, how do we use it from a visorPro perspective to have more stickiness to the customer? This is what allows people to do that. John, your experience in the industry goes back a long ways. You have this broad view of the industry. Associated Equipment Distributors has all sorts of businesses that are belonging to their association. From that perspective, talk a little bit about your experience so far with respect to data integrity, and what it is that we're doing, and talk a little bit about what you have experienced with that sort of component, the data integrity, the security, all of that stuff. Data security has become a big issue across the country, starting with California and their privacy legislation that they have in place. But it's imperative on a dealer to not only be protecting the customer's data and information because of state law, but also their own internal data as well. Earlier this year, we had a cybersecurity breach by one of the major business systems providers. And that really shut down dealers to some extent because of that. They had to go back to do things manually. Now, through this process, what we found is the dealers that were on that business system who were on visorPro, at the very least had access to some of their data, some of their information to take care of the customer. And this is something that I just don't see going back. I think there's going to be additional pressures on dealers, perhaps even increased fines on businesses that do not protect their data when it comes to the customer data. But that's just one segment of it. The last thing any dealership needs is to have their financial data or their customer information compromised by a third party. And I think visorPro is one of those tools that can assist in that area because the vault is secure. And it's only the dealer's information that goes into the vault and nobody else has access to the vault, to that information that the dealer has put in there. When we're working with the dealership, one of the things that, you know, AI is evolving, Brock. It's evolving. And one of the things that, you know, we've done is we built human in the loop. And so I want you to talk a little bit about the importance of that human in the loop, because we're not abdicating all of the answers to AI. There's a human in the loop involved in the process. I'll go to Wayne after this to talk about how they're integrating that at Torgeson's. But can you talk a little bit about that human in the loop aspect? Yeah, I think it's really important, actually. You know, Brion mentioned using this as kind of a second brain for their people. And that's how we think about this. You know, what we're doing is we're really augmenting people. This is like an efficiency assistant that can sit next to you and help you find information that's really relevant to you. With generative AI and kind of the state of it today, you know, it does sometimes get things wrong. And this is why for us it's really important to have that human in the loop. We've built our system to be very, very specific to the data that's in there. And it generally does that. But from a safety and ethical perspective, you know, I wouldn't want this going out to the wrong people and giving them, you know, maybe even the right information. But if they ask the question in a weird way, they're still getting the wrong information because they're not interacting with it in an appropriate way. And that can cause a lot of issues for an end user. And so, you know, the human in the loop component is really about safety. It's really about using AI in kind of an ethical and right way. And, you know, when we look at this, what we really see is this is a tool that can really augment the people in these dealerships and make them much, much more efficient by interacting with the information that they have in a much easier way. Well, that's interesting, Wayne. Augmented intelligence, the augmentation. So when a question goes in and Vi extracts the answer, it comes with best management practices and safety procedures. But it also comes with the references where the answer came from. Can you talk a little bit about that experiential side of the equation inside of the platform? Absolutely. And that was one of the key selling points when we started developing this with Brock. And again, we had a lot of hesitation from our key initial group of, OK, is it like general AI where if it doesn't know the answer, it's going to make up the answer? And that was every technician's fear, right? Because it's their reputation on the line. And so when we started implementing this, we started with a small core group of people and then kind of broadened that group as we went. And the security blanket that made our technicians and our people feel the best was the fact that, OK, where visorPro pulls the information from, it's going to list those references down below. So now, OK, is AI really on the right track? Well, here, let me click into this service manual and see exactly where it pulled the information from. That drove the security of it and raised the belief factor up, right? And so that's really what's gotten our feet under us with visorPro of taking it to the next level of it's not just some bot making up an answer and reformulating an answer. It's going to our vault, pulling our information. And Brock touched on what I think is one of the very key components. Now, it's not just our OEM data. It's our technician data, right? It's when that 30-year technician walks out the door, he takes his notebook with him. And every technician has a notebook, OK? That's what can help us take our customer service to the next level, as Brion is saying, is at the end of the day, it's how quick can we take care of our customers, right? How efficient can we take care of our customers? And that reference material and getting the confidence within our people was a huge part of that. Brion, you talked about the A technicians C's to A's, stretching the minds of A's. When an A technician has answered the same question for the 105th time, they get pretty tired of it. So this happens all the time. And the thought process here is to be able to capture that A technician, that Torgerson, A technician's brain inside the Torgerson vault so that when the question is asked, that answer is referenced from the technician's experiential knowledge captured inside the Torgerson vault. Can you talk a little bit about how excited you get when you hear about that and your experience as a business owner in the burnout factor that goes on with these A-level technicians? Absolutely. I use one word when you ask that question. I use one word that comes to mind. It's integrity from the customer's perspective. What's that mean? Consider a customer asking five different technicians in the Torgerson complex the same question. And that customer gets five answers that are about 60% the same. What type of integrity does that customer get built in his mind, so the subconscious of his mind on Torgerson's? It's probably not great. But yet, as we continue forward and these technicians are just double-checking or typing that question into the Advisor Pro, they're going to be able to answer that question to that customer on a much more of the same philosophy and give much more of the same answer, if you will. Because we see that happen quite a bit, right? Technicians have different ways at addressing a problem or coming at a problem. And the more that we can start to collaborate and get into Advisor Pro solutions, we start training our technicians. Okay, yes, we're going to look for Advisor Pro for an answer, but also let's look in Advisor Pro for a solution. That's the power of where we can take this to the next step. It's impossible to do that without Advisor Pro, without having that knowledge into the vault and really, as we say, it's our second brain. So I look at it from that aspect as well. John, again, from that horizon that you have, as we look towards the equipment is getting more special, the equipment is getting more sophisticated over time. It used to be, it was all iron. And if you were able to weld, you can fix most things. Today, there's black boxes all over the place. It's getting more and more technical in nature because of the computers that are integrated and the GPS and all of this stuff. And I want you to touch on the labor constraint. You touched on it in your opening comment, but as you stare into the future, if we don't leverage tools like this, we're, as an industry, dealing with equipment, servicing customers, it's problematic. Yeah, absolutely, I agree. And I think one of the greatest things about the construction equipment industry, certainly on the ag equipment side, industrial equipment and forestry equipment is the technology in this equipment and the sophistication of the equipment. And you would think that that would be an attraction to someone who's looking as a technician, as a career choice of our industry, because of the sophistication of the equipment. Unfortunately, I think as an industry, we haven't done as great a job of promoting the technology and promoting the sophistication to the next generation of technicians that are coming in. That's on us, that's on us, on our associations and on our dealerships of doing that. But I think with what the work the AED Foundation is doing, we're making steps in that direction. And the partnership that AED has with schools right across the country is phenomenal of raising the awareness of not only the shortage of technicians, but how increasingly sophisticated it is and how great a career that you can have in the industry in servicing equipment. So, you know, in addition to the challenges that we have on time with our technicians, we also have an attrition rate of about 8% for technicians leave the industry every year. So anything that we can do in terms of tools to bring technicians like Brion has done from outside the industry into our industry to make that transition easier and make it attractive is going to benefit the industry as a whole. Brock, you're not from the equipment sector. Your background is all AI and data science and everything. And so all of a sudden you find yourself conversing with the likes of Wayne and Brian and people like that. What's your impression of how, you know, what was your initial impression of the equipment industry compared to what you've learned today? I mean, I don't know if my impression has really changed. Just the complexity of this industry is really interesting. There's dynamics going on that you wouldn't really know from an outside point of view between the manufacturer and the dealership and the end user, whether that's in construction, forestry or agriculture. You know, the relationships that go on there are pretty interesting to follow. But, you know, if I look at how the equipment itself is evolving and the ability to service it and provide a good customer experience around it, you know, these things are getting very complicated. If you look at ag machinery, you know, combine driving across the field is like a little factory, just like all the stuff that it's trying to do to get that grain off the field is really amazing. And I know in forestry, you know, the ability to grab kind of the tree and cut it into the right size logs and knowing what kind of tree it is, like the amount of computing on these pieces of equipment is just astounding. And with that comes this higher degree of difficulty when it comes to servicing it. So you have, you know, the mechanics, the hydraulics, the electronics, the computation, all of those things all need to work together. And to have one technician who knows how to service all of those pieces is really hard to get to that. And, you know, I think there's a great opportunity for AI in this space to help mitigate a lot of that complexity. And, you know, even, you know, I talk about how complex these things are, it's also really hard to have good documentation on how to service it in the first place. You know, for some of these OEMs. And one thing that I think is interesting is as a dealership, you're on the front lines of servicing it. And you might not have all the information you need from the OEM to provide all that service, but a lot of your guys are figuring it out. And now the dealership has a lot of knowledge about how to service different pieces of equipment. And there's a lot of institutional knowledge there that is quite valuable for these dealerships. So mostly Rob, to answer your question, the complexity of the industry is what kind of astounds me and continues to impress me. There's a lot to learn about this industry for sure. Wayne, we're talking about the complexity of the equipment. It was mentioned earlier that a lot of the recruits that are coming into the Torgerson business may not have a background in construction or earth moving or agriculture or forestry. These are young men and women that are interested in technology. But to pick up on what Brock just said there, your thoughts around using the AI, not only to solve the problem, but to train these new people. Can you talk a little bit about your thoughts on that side of it? Absolutely. We all dream in the industry of hiring that technician that has 10 years of service and brings a wealth of knowledge with him. They just don't exist anymore or they're a unicorn if they do exist. And anymore, we are hiring attitude and aptitude, right? And if we can find that person that has the right attitude, we can teach and train on about anything. And Brion touched on it perfectly when he said, we're looking at not just one vendor, we're looking at 35 vendors. And now you touch it with something as complicated as machine control, right? I seen an interesting question come across on visorPro the other day of machine control components on a certain piece of equipment. Okay, I wouldn't even have known where to go in and look for that information in a manual or I wouldn't. But it was a question posed to visorPro, it spit out a question or an answer and got us going down the right direction, okay? So now we can bring in that individual that has the right attitude and the smarts and these kids, they wanna learn, right? And it's taken a very complex industry as Brock has said and boiled it down to where we can now eat that elephant in the much smaller bites and get them up to speed much quicker. Because again, I mean, with the attrition rate of 8% in the technician world, okay, just do the math, that's bringing on a lot of new people. And a lot of those new people don't have that industry experience. So to your point, Rob, the quicker we can get them up to speed and give them a tool to make finding those answers more efficient, it's a home run. Brion, earlier you'd mentioned driving 120 miles to service a piece of equipment. We're designing the AI to work over fairly thin architecture so you can leverage the AI when you're out in the field. Just talk a little bit about the costs that are associated with remote servicing and how you think that AI might be able to help, how visorPro might be able to help. Just again, this is unscripted. I'm just interested in your thoughts about that. You mentioned the 120 miles and I know that's true. Sure, and all day there's no cost or continuing to escalate. You look at a field service truck today versus a short five years ago, 10 years ago, and paying for a rolling asset and you add on a tax wage. In Montana, you look at these, Wyoming, you look at these big geographic areas with not a lot of customers in between. So our efficiency is an absolute must. Let me take a look at what can visorPro do for us. A lot of times when you have a technician 120 miles out there, today's world, as Wayne mentioned, yes, more and more experienced techs are going to be out there, but we are working on various models, we're working on various brands in the same day. So it's really impossible for one technician to be the expert on three different OEMs and three different models. So if we can speed up the technician's time at the customer's place on farm, on the job site, we're probably talking one to two more customer touches per day. Well, that's huge. And you look at customer satisfaction and that I can get to you quicker. Tremendous. So really, it's customer stickiness at the same time. The field service technician, when he's there, he's prideful that he has the answer and that he can fix the piece of equipment the first time, not go back out. When he's there and able to fix that either faster or have an answer for a customer because he's using the ability of visorPro as a second brain, the confidence just goes through the roof. So I look at it from a technician's perspective, look in the mirror, it's much more confident. Customer, get them up and going quicker, create stickiness, and then the knowledge piece of it. Yeah. John, you're at a conference, you're talking to people, smaller OEMs right now, smaller original manufacturers, equipment manufacturers that would feed into Brian's business. Can you talk a little bit about how you see smaller OEMs leveraging AI and then connecting that to the dealer vault so they don't have to go to 13 portals, they can go to one? Yeah, I think one of the biggest challenges that the specialty manufacturers have or smaller OEMs is presence within the dealership. A lot of our dealers carry a main line and like in Brion's case, multiple specialty lines, additional product lines that they have. And those additional product lines want the same attention from the dealer that the dealer is giving to their main line. And it's very difficult for the dealer to do that. But that customer relationship that the dealership has, it doesn't really matter if it's a main line or an additional product line, the dealer wants to take care of that customer to the best of their ability. But we've had numerous conversations with specialty manufacturers where they see a pathway to assist the repair of their equipment by working with dealerships by providing an AI solution, just like a major OEM would be. So I wouldn't want to rule out AI for a specialty manufacturer because there certainly is an application there for them to increase the efficiency at the dealership on that product, but also to increase the brand value of that specialty manufacturer as well. If that customer is being taken care of well by the dealer, that does ultimately help the brand as well. Brion. Yeah, thanks, Rob. John, when John was speaking there, he just reminded me of something I wanted to make sure I got in there. One thing that our job is to increase market share, grow equipment sales for the brands we represent. All right, that's a given. One thing I think our, let's just say our major OEMs forget sometimes is that we can go in and we're going to go into a competing customer, right? Well, generally speaking, we can go into a customer that's running different colors of iron that we sell. We can go in with a smaller OEM or a specialty OEM and gain business that way first, right? Well, obviously the end goal is to bring in some major brands that we are carrying like every day. So the power of a one-stop shop, I talk about this all the time, a one-stop shop for all of our brands, big brand, small brand, specialty brand, doesn't matter what we represent. To have a one-stop shop where everything is in our vault and our technicians, be it parts people, be it salespeople, have one vault to go to and can get an answer for whatever brand that we're carrying. Powerful and tide rises all ships, right? That's our focus. That's why we jumped in because we can see not just what you created, Rob, with visorPro from a technician perspective, but this thing has a lot of legs of where we can take this. That's the exciting part. Yeah, you know, I think that, you know, you said it earlier, Brion, that we knew that there was going to be efficient at the technical level. We're seeing efficiencies now at service manager, service writer levels, and I'm intrigued by, you know, salespeople eventually tapping into visorPro. Change management inside of your business, inside of any business is hard, and so everybody's got a certain way of doing things, but, you know, based on what we're seeing right now, your service writers are taking advantage of this. We're going to go to Brock in a second, a little bit about how to integrate into the business systems that you have, but when you see, I think you and I talked about this at one point in time, where if you can make your salespeople look smarter, faster by answering questions quicker, then more business comes to them. Thoughts around that, Brion? Rephrase that, Rob, when you're saying that. We talked about the technicians being the first ones that we're going to use at service writers now. We talked, you mentioned parts people, but I've always been intrigued by the potential of even salespeople tapping into and asking questions from Vi. Right, and again, really the salespeople that we're bringing to the industry, Rob, are following the same path of our young technicians that don't have industry knowledge, but as Wayne said, attitude, aptitude. Imagine, and we're not there yet, but we're going to be there. Imagine taking operators manuals on how many different models and how many different brands, having this inside the visorPro vault, and the salesperson is really interacting with that vault no different than a technician, and one of the main things that we see with salespeople is when they get into their industry, it's the complexity, it's the many models, the serial numbers. I mean, there's so many breaks, right, and it's almost too much. We lose salespeople not because of aptitude or attitude. We lose salespeople because of confidence, and salespeople, generally speaking, they want some quick wins. Most people, I always say this to a prospective salesperson, selling in the retail space of agriculture, of construction, of forestry is unlike no other. You can be successful selling in any other retail space in the world, but when you come into ag, construction, forestry, it's a different ballgame, and no disrespect, it's a tough selling environment. It is not easy. Anything that we can do to grow confidence in our people is an absolute must, so when you take visorPro, they can type a question in about this model or that model because they can talk to five customers in a day, and each customer may have a different question on different brands. It becomes overbearing for a new salesperson. How do I learn this stuff? It's tough for us as a dealer to say, okay, we're going to specialize you in this one area, and then we'll just slowly grow you. It's like, that's tough, right? Got to have some revenue coming in, and so does that person. That person wants to make a wage too, but that's where I see us taking this and really growing our sales team at the same level or every bit as fast as our technicians. Wayne, when you hear Brion talk about that, again, this is totally, we're just moving the conversation. I'm going to go to Brock after Wayne, but Wayne, as you listen to Brion talk about that kind of excitement about what's possible, what's going through your brain? Well, and he hit on keyword confidence, right? I'll take it back to our service writer model. If the service writer who, again, may have no industry knowledge and is new to the seat, can ask the right questions the first time, now can maybe help keep that A-tech more organized, so we're sending the right A-tech to the right job, right? Because nothing worse than sending one of our best people 120 miles to find out he's ill-prepared because no one can be an expert in everything, right? Again, it's not just building confidence of our salespeople, it's building confidence of our technicians and of our support staff, of our parts people. I just, I cringe when I think of the hours lost and the fear on a parts person's face when a customer comes to the counter and says, I need oil for my 620 quad. I want to change the hydraulics. Can you tell me what oil and what the capacities are? And it's like, oh man, where do I start looking? How long is it going to take me? And how foolish do I look when I don't know that off the top of my head? Okay, visorPro, again, is a tool we can use to get to that question much faster, build confidence and pride in that person answering the question, whether they're a whole goods salesman, a parts salesman or a technician or a technician support person. So again, it's a tool to help build that. And again, kind of what we touched on earlier is remove the frustration. No one wants to look foolish, right? So, the more professional we can come across quicker, the better we are for the end user. I love that. I picked up some really cool notes. Manufacturing time, we talked about augmented intelligence, we talked about confidence. Brock, if there's anybody on the webinar that has a question, just punch it into the Q&A and I'll answer it. We're winding down here. Brock, without giving away too much of our secret sauce, talk a little bit about your vision about integration of the AI into the business systems that are at Torgeson's and how we're going to go from vault to brain to asset. Yeah, I mentioned this already. The business systems in these dealerships have a lot of information in them. And today, it's really difficult to access it in a meaningful way. With AI layered on top of it, there's a lot that you can do with it. I see a lot of opportunities for helping elevate your customers' experience with the dealerships, especially in the areas of planning work, quoting work, estimating work, and kind of completing that work on the service side. There's going to be opportunities on the sales side as well. But you can think about Wayne had an example of sending your A technician out to a job 120 miles away and to realize that he's ill-prepared for whatever reason. In the business system, you can find information about a potential job if you know what the presenting problem is. You might have a good idea about, or you might be able to get a good idea about what parts you'll need to bring with you, what specialty tools you may need as well to complete that job, and roughly how long it'll take you to do it, and even who else completed this type of job in the past. So that when that A technician gets out on the scene, they got the right things in their truck, they know roughly how long it's going to take them. And if they do run into a situation where it's like, I haven't seen this before, and I don't really know what to do, they might know who to call in their organization to help them get unstuck very quickly. And I see all this information inside of the business system. And the direction that we're moving with visorPro, this is kind of our next target is bringing this into the system and finding key insights out of it to really help the service department level up that customer experience. Wayne, you had something to add to this. Yes, and Brock just again reminded me of a thing that I think is so powerful with visorPro. One of our key people, Kareem, worked hand in hand with Brock and Wilson on the part side of visorPro. And again, think what this can do eventually of, I can ask visorPro where is this part number used? And it searches our work order history, and it pulls up work orders that involve that part number. Again, now that technician that's going out 120 miles can say, okay, this job when it was done before, and maybe not even in our branch, one of the other branches in Wyoming or Montana, wherever, now can say, man, at the snap of a finger, I have six other repair jobs similar to this, I can go much more prepared. And so to me, it's going to be a very powerful part of the tool. Excellent. I got one question from Kevin, can visorPro be implemented for an OEM to use inside their company, even if the dealer isn't on? The answer is yes. So that's one of the things we're trying to communicate is that this is a AI strategy for you as an OEM. You don't want to get into the business of building AI, that's not your business. Keep building your products and equipment, and we will build the AI and that can allow you to service internally better, and allow you to service your external customers. And if the dealer is on visorPro, then you simply connect your OEM vault to Torgesons. That's the way we see this thing going. Again, Brion has said this over and over again about one portal rather than 13. So we're very open to working with the OEMs as well. John, to wrap up, if somebody is interested in, you know, learning more about visorPro, this is really what you're designed to do. Can you talk a little bit about your strategy and what we can do in terms of a sequence to get people comfortable and understanding and eventually implementing visorPro? Yeah, so following this webinar, we're going to be reaching out to all the participants and invite you to take part in a demo. We've kind of talked a little bit at the at a 35,000 foot view, and we've got right down into the into the weeds of how this is benefiting Torgesons equipment. But there's a power in showing how Vi works, and we would invite everybody and anybody to reach out to us, and we be pleased to spend 30 minutes with you on a demo of showing the power of Vi. And for that demo, you know, we would like to invite not only the decision makers in the dealership, but your aftermarket people, your service people, and some of your key technicians as well. And during the demo, we test the system where it is a live demo. It's not a canned presentation where we invite the participants in this demo to ask Vi questions and to see the power of how quickly it spits out the answer, and shares the reference material, and gives access to things like diagrams in the service manuals as well too. So we invite everybody to spend some time with us on a demo. We're also going to be at the dealer development event with AED in Arizona beginning of November, and of course we'll be at the AED Summit on Orlando in 2025. John and I and a few others will be there. I want to thank Wayne, and Brion, and Brock, and John for your participation. I want to thank AED for organizing this webinar for us. I know it will be widely shared as a recording afterwards. Katrina, thank you and AED for doing a wonderful job. We're at the top of the hour. Everybody have a great week, and we're looking forward to having deeper and more conversations about how to build an AI strategy for your business. Thanks a lot everyone. Thank you so much to everyone for joining us, and thank you for presenting today. Have a good day everyone. Thank you. Thank you very much everyone.

AI in business

equipment dealership

VisorPro

service efficiency

training processes

human decision-making

labor constraints

customer relationships

data integrity