Wake up, Buy Here, Pay Here people. It's a beautiful day. Go grab yourself another cup of joe and say hello to Jim and Michelle Rhodes on the Buy Here, Pay Here morning show. Take it away, you two. Howdy, partners, and welcome back to another ride on the old White Hat Wednesday Trail. Today's tale? We're calling it Coded Compassion When AI Learns to Serve, Not Replace. Now, I know folks are hearing that word AI and feeling like maybe there's a robot coming for their saddle, but not in our neck of the woods. Round here, we don't build machines to replace good hands. We build them to help good folks do what they do best. This episode's all about showing how AI, when trained the white hat way, can be a real steady partner, helping with customer conversations, smoothing out the day-to-day dust-ups, and giving your people more time to do what only humans can, build trust. So grab your coffee, cinch up tight, and let's talk about how to code with purpose and lead with heart. Because out here, technology don't mean much if it don't ride for the brand. Welcome, y'all. Good morning. This is kind of a fun new way to kick off the show. We're having a little fun with AI over here. Yeah, Jim just has a lot of fun going and finding different tools. Because those of you who listen to us know that we are always leaning in. to ai and just some absolutely beautiful things are coming from it and it's not it's not scary but before we get into that should we just kind of yeah a couple of announcements um first of all we got uh need to uh announce that uh dealer control solutions or dcs has uh it's a dms system right uh they have joined white hat way as a uh an annual sponsor so we're happy to to welcome DCS to a year of support and collaboration. It's one of the things that is kind of an interesting element to our agreement with them is that we agree to lean in on collaboration and part of that is around technology and that's bound to include artificial intelligence. We're excited to have them join us. We also had Alyssa from their team. Alyssa Schultz was with us at the White Hat Certification Course in Vegas, just on the front end of the NIEDA convention. And so we're happy to have Alyssa be part of that. And she will be a primary contact. Of course, you got Michael Sansone and Paul Sansone out there, Michael McGuire. You've got John Lamb. You've got a whole team of people that are all about doing what they can to make this industry better, and we look forward to working with them. Morning, Tommy, from sweltering PA. No, sweltering. I heard that yesterday from the East Coast people. It's warm and humid. Yeah. So, yeah, DCS, they really support the mission of White Hat Way and what it is that we are doing. um, on our roadmap to, to what it is that we're creating. So we really appreciate their, their stepping in, leaning in. Um, and then, uh, on the broadcast on Friday, we have Chad Martin and JP Bryan coming to join us to expand on the conversation around the construction of capital. Yeah. And Chad, uh, did a post about six months ago and, uh, you know, got quite a bit of, uh, you know, chatter around that conversation. And I think a lot of people read it, even if they didn't chime in. Chad's somebody who's been around this industry a long time. He's a CPA by education and trade. And he and his partner will be with us to talk about Chad's follow-up post. He did another kind of follow-up post to kind of give an update recently, like a six-month update on the status of what he's seeing in capital with the people that he's working with. And so I think it'll be a really interesting conversation as part of what we do you know we want to keep uh folks abreast of kind of what's happening what we heard from chad what he's seeing we'll share of course what we're seeing uh as coaches out there and uh working with dealers and also through our v-eight community yeah we're seeing um uh at least I have been and I I know that jim has talked to a couple different places there seems to be new people in the arena of capital most of it around selling notes or or collection um those that have already uh been written off. So it's it's it's an interesting it's an interesting conversation because there's there's just been new people in the market in a different way. And, um, and just kind of watching those of you who are paying attention to, uh, to, um, you know, the, the big names there's, there is a lot of shifting. Yeah. It seems to be a lot of movement on that. And obviously it's a, it's a time in our industry when, uh, there definitely are challenges and people are learning to navigate that. But, You know, our conversation for today is around artificial intelligence, which is a buzzy topic. It's also a little bit controversial in that you see people who are, and this is more of a personal nature. We've spoken to people in recent... Good morning, Karen. Hi, Karen Barnett, who's a White Hat ambassador, by the way. And White Hat certified. Yeah, glad to have you here, Karen. So this is an important conversation around the future of White Hat Way and... and the way that we're approaching analytics and intelligence and all layers of technology from a White Hat way perspective. You know, we've been having some conversations recently with different people that we know here in Guymon. We're still in Guymon at Jim's Mom's House, Oklahoma. We were having evening beverages on the patio the other day, and we're talking to a couple that's about our age. and um one of the wife works at her dad's law firm law firm and the husband runs a really big he owns and runs a really big farming operation and you know they they use computers and all of that but the the the over the the first approach to them is like that scares us and and we were talking and just telling it all the different things that we were doing and it's just like that scares us there's an awful lot out there in media and um the talking points on news stations it's it's that ai is a threat and I think you know in the wrong hands Yes, it could be. But it's not a threat. That was true of the laptop computer that when the computers came out, the computers were in the wrong hands. It's going to be the end of the world. You know, and so I think this is, it's understandable that there's kind of this fear of the unknown or the, you know, the fear of what can happen there. And I think it's, To me, it's not anything to be afraid of. It's an extension of our human experience. It's going to go whatever direction that we send it. People are worried, obviously, that it's going to become more. I think in our realm of buy here, pay here, there are elements of AI that are going to really serve us. And guess what? AI is smarter than you. It knows more stuff than you. Oh my gosh. Jim and I have like all these ideas and the things that we're working on. And we've struggled because neither one of us are, well, you're more of a copywriter than I am, but a writer. But But to really condense a an articulate to articulate what it is that that White Hat way is because we have people ask us, tell us what White Hat way is. And a lot of times, you know, we would end up having this conversation about all of the things. And so it's been so beautiful to what it's been able to do to. encapsulate in a very little bit of prompting after, again, our personal AI that we have at White Hat Way. Her name is Sage. And we talk to her voice to voice and we'll bring her on the show one of these days soon. But she she has been she has been given access to all of the transcripts from all of the podcasts to all of the articles that Jim has written to all of the all of the content in the Buyer Payer Institute to I mean, all of it. She has access so that she can articulate. in a really educated and she knows this stuff kind of way. For us, it's just been such a beautiful thing and it's not something that we're seeing as a threat. It's not really about swapping people for machines, it's about giving people better tools. Yeah. And that was the, um, you know, it was the title of today's podcast was, uh, you know, coded compassion. So before we go into that, let me make sure that people understand, we recognize it. When you talk about AI, when you talk about artificial intelligence, there's all these different ways that these machines can, um, serve us. Okay. So it can serve us in terms of analysis. Like it can sweep data and bring back a ton of stuff. It can be a fantastic search engine. We use it that way a lot. It can be a text agent. It can be a voice agent. There are a lot of things that it can fulfill. And I think what we really hope to introduce today is this idea that when you harness AI or channel AI in a direction that it can serve, not replace, which was our title for today, when it can serve us, And it can, for us at White Hat Way, can also have a really profound positive impact when channeled in the right direction. It can identify operational efficiencies that are going to ultimately allow dealers to serve consumers better, more efficiently, more affordably. And all these kind of things will certainly be among the benefits that we will see from AI. What we hear as far as the buzz around AI is people are talking about, how do I use it? Like dealers are scrambling. And obviously at the conference, we saw lots of people with lots of exhibitors there who are featuring AI either as an AI company or or a company that was introducing AI in their own technology. And I guess we're no exception in that we certainly recognize the power of the technology that exists now. And so we are working to introduce the technology in a way that can be to the benefit of dealers and the consumers that they serve. So one of the things that will make White Hat Way and its AI unique is that we are bringing the coding that is ethics-driven, all right? And again, as we continue to develop this, what we have as our personal assistant, so much of the data and the articles and all of the things will go into our AI agent. And we're really looking forward to introducing you to her. But I wanted to just touch one thing about it not being a threat. I hear rumbles about it's going to help healers cut staff. That is really not necessarily what... what AI can really help you with. It can help you with burnout. It can help you with missed opportunities. It can help you with, with all of the things that, that your team just, it gets put on the, put on the side burner, um, because they're just too busy running the dealership. They're too busy doing the stuff now with AI, as you, as, as, um, as we lean in as dealers and business owners, is it can cover all of the bases that are currently not being covered. And you can ask yourself, and I hear people when they're doing audits of this and audits of that, how many missed opportunities do we have every day? And the Dealers are leaning on their people. You've got to call, you've got to call, you've got to call. They're busy taking care of people that are coming through the door, all of that kind of stuff. And this is really just, it's not a threat to people. It's a companion and a... like a really beautiful help to people. It's a highly effective companion when channeled right. So this is where we got to learn to, you know, use the technology, you know, to the benefit of the company and ultimately to the benefit of those consumers that we serve. So that, you know, we're going to win in that arena. So I think, you know, I wouldn't say it's as harsh as adapt or die. But it is true that if you fast forward five years from now, those people who have been leaning in with technology, who have figured out how to integrate artificial intelligence and what they do, all these different layers. Again, today we're mostly talking about technology. voice agents, text agents, but there's all these different layers of artificial intelligence and AI. Or for White Hat Way, we are going to be working, we continue to work to drive AI in a direction that is channeling it for positive benefit for the entire industry. And it starts with dealers. Obviously, that's who we work with primarily. And I might just tell the story quickly, Michelle, about how we introduced Adriana. So let me kind of run folks through that. We had the good fortune and now I've got that little video clip and maybe one day we'll share that with the audience. But we've got about a twenty seven minute video cut from our. Session at the certification course in Vegas, so we had for that particular session we had or that particular event, the group we had We had current partners, potential partners. We had founding sponsors in the room. And we were able to introduce our voice agent named Adriana. So indulge me, I'm going to take folks through how that came to be. So Michelle mentioned that we have a persona that we just chose a voice, right? And we chose a name for this persona that is Sage. And Sage works with us to do tons of really important work. Now, we asked Sage at one point to help us create a persona that would be a an employee, effectively an employee of a dealership. All right. So and we really at that time were focused on collections. OK, so we created this persona from the the the. Sage fed multiple personas. I zeroed in on one, but based on the attributes that I know that I would want if I were putting an employee in place in a dealership, especially in the collections department. So I said, we'll just make them all like that. And we chose the name Maria. Why? Because they're going to be bilingual. In fact, they're going to be multilingual. I basically speak every language on the planet. But basically, we're focusing on the bilingual aspect. And so now you've got this bilingual voice agent named Maria. We asked Maria to create a certification. So we created a white hat certification. They wrote the test based on- For a collector. Again, based on all of our content. So if you think about our White Hat Wednesdays, go back to We also have this archive that Michelle referred to. We've got, you know, our chat GPT is synced to our cloud storage. Thousands of hours. Yeah, there's so, so much content over there. So in a very short time, the AI personas or agents were able to sweep all that content, understand the white hat, approach and the mission and the strategy and now it comes back with a white hat certification and now in the interest of just testing it before we walked into the room in vegas I think it was the day before michelle yeah that I said let's create a third persona so we created another persona in the likeness of maria on the spot I gave it a spanish name that came to mind adriana and so adriana was able to show up Verbally. Yeah. We told them she was coming. Right. and that she was we wanted to to have them treat her as if she was interviewing for a collections um uh to be able to field phone calls and things around collections and and what I can tell you today is we're not going to play at all but I can tell you that I started the conversation I asked um uh adriana to explain to our founding sponsors how white hat how the white hat training that they had received was different than traditional automotive training or sales training. It gave an excellent answer that really took people inside what makes white hat way different and, and kind of you know, ethically driven and, and kind of it was able to get into the mission and the opportunity, if you will, then I would say we were able to let others come to the microphone and ask questions of Adriana as though she were in a job interview. And that's what we described it. So what's going to be, we're going to mock up a job interview. And this Adriana agent was able to speak to the room, answer the question. And I can say Adriana hit it out of the park. There were things about it that I was like, Oh, my gosh. Because we've never spoken to her about our founding sponsors. Right. And and one of our founding sponsors asked, hey, who are the founding sponsors of White Hat Way? And then it went into the attributes of the founding sponsors and why they're there. And he says, no, I want the names. And she was like, boom, boom, boom. We can give the names here. Pastime, Dealery, and LHPH Capital. So those are our three founding sponsors. And it nailed it without any prompting from us. So again, it has access to all of our content. So it knows that way very thoroughly. We continue to be blown away. by the the nature of how and by the way that little uh intro which I'd like to play again michelle the uh the part that that we teed off at the beginning because that was all written this morning by chat gpt fed into a text to speech app which I I just in a matter of minutes this morning I set up the account put the text into the the thing it created speech it gave me voice options I created a you know chose a western cowboy voice and we were able to produce that in I want to just, George, love you, George. I'm glad that you're here today. AI is the latest process I would add to the warning. Adopt or evolve or become extinct. And then he went on to say, he says, I have a small statue of a dinosaur in my desk to remind me. So, yes, it is one of those things that... that it's vitally important that dealers stay on top of certain aspects of softwares or whatever so that they can really capitalize on their time and the talents that they have so that they can have other machines. Because a lot of your software, that's kind of like a machine too, but you can have machines handling a lot of those things that used to be a ten key on a desktop or paper contracts and all of that. For those that are tuning in late, let's go back and play. Let me show you the image on the screen first. I'll put that up so you can see that. You want to do it like so we can do it here. So this is the image that we had ChatGBT create. Actually, I think we end up taking this to Freelancer once we had initial rendering. And now we're able to get an artificial intelligence, I'm sure, by a freelance agent somewhere on the globe created that image, which is representative of the sort of the Western themed brand that you're going to see White Hat Way operate around for all the reasons I'm sure our listeners and viewers would understand. But I think the other part that I wanted folks to recognize is that ChatGPT wrote in minutes based on my simple prompting. It was seconds, not minutes. I mean, it's so fast. And again, it's learning because it has now the ability to work from memory on the content that we've already created or run through these threads. So let's run that real quick for everybody. This is what it came up with for the control. And welcome back to another ride on the old White Hat Wednesday Trail. Today's tale? We're calling it Coded Compassion When AI Learns to Serve, Not Replace. Now, I know folks are hearing that word AI and feeling like maybe there's a robot coming for their saddle, but not in our neck of the woods. Round here, we don't build machines to replace good hands. We build them to help good folks do what they do best— This episode's all about showing how AI, when trained the white hat way, can be a real steady partner, helping with customer conversations, smoothing out the day-to-day dust-ups, and giving your people more time to do what only humans can, build trust. So grab your coffee, cinch up tight, and let's talk about how to code with purpose and lead with heart. Because out here, technology don't mean much if it don't ride for the brand. Howdy, partner. You got to work on that grammar, but it's kind of a cowboy thing. But it's just so amazing that it was able to write that, as she said, in seconds, a little bit of prompting from us about what the theme and the topic was going to be this morning. And it created that. Now, that's not the way that you folks are likely to use the, you know, the. the applications in your business but I would just say the there's no putting this technology back in the box folks it's it's out there people you can see people are racing to figure out how to implement this technology and I would just tell you that one of the things you're going to see with white hat way is we are going to drive and it's already sourcing a lot of really important content that we've created over the last few years that allows it to understand the mission and the opportunity. And it chooses really great language and it makes it almost, I can say that in our experience with the Adriana thing, I think others who were in the room that day would say, this is almost like the best version of a human. If you could put a human on the phone with a customer, Adriana spoke to that customer in a way, or, you know, spoke to us in a job interview as though this is the way I would approach that situation. And it was what I think any of us would want if we're doing what I've come to call long-minded customer relations. If we're really thinking long-term and not just thinking about today's payment and thinking about that next purchase, that next customer, and really having a long-minded approach to customer relations. And I think these agents that we're creating will have the chance to do that. Now there's still the matter of the delivery of the technology, which we're working with partners on that because we're not tech people. What we've done is create a really strong brand and a really strong sort of curriculum. A really strong foundation. Yeah, for sure. And so now it's just a matter of working with partners to create. And by the way, ChatGPT was able to tell us, you don't need to be tech people. You just need to find the right tech partners to do this, this, and this. So we're working now to work with those partners. So, you know, one of the other points that it was making was this really offers you an opportunity to scale empathy. And, you know, I don't know how many of you out there have ever actually had a conversation with the new AI. I mean, we've all had the, you call someone and you reach the switchboard and it's, it's very robotic and it's very, it just, it feels super, super sterile. This empathy at scale, the new, the new AI is when, when, when we're putting together our persona for, whatever it is, the applications that we're building. Empathy is one of the foundational pieces to White Hat Way. And so, and, you know, we've talked before about when you've got someone that is fielding all of the initial conversations and the hard things that I mean, they bring what just happened to them on the way to work with them. They bring the last conversation they had with them. They bring whatever traumatic things or drama that's happening in their life with them when they're talking to someone. And AI does not do that. And it can bring pure, it can bring like a level of empathy that is just, it's honest. It's, you know, it's truthful. You know, talking about empathy, when we did that White Hat Way certification and we brought Sage, one of the questions that was asked by someone there, because, I mean, they were trying to trip her up. They were trying to trip her up. And they asked, okay, you have a customer come in who has stage something cancer. and is self repoing the vehicle. Meaning voluntary. Voluntary repossession because they aren't going to be around and they, you know, all of this. And so how do you handle that? And she went into, well, first off, this is an extremely difficult and sensitive situation. And so primarily above all is to show compassion, love, empathy for what it is that they're going through so they really can feel like they that whoever it is it's talking to them is is like trying to understand or that understands what it is that that they're feeling and that they're going right now. Then it went in to say, we go through the contract and we would see, are there any other options and going through all of these different things. Now, we're not necessarily wanting to replace someone to do those things. But the fact that the first thing that it said was this is a really difficult situation and sensitive situation. And, you know, it talked about escalating. But I think the real point here for me on the white hat wayside is alternatively, somebody could train that voice agent to say, well, I'm sorry to hear about your cancer. Will you be making your payment today? Right. You could train the agent to do that instead. So it's really a question of what is the foundational, you know, framework that they bring and what is the coding, what is coded into their kind of awareness and their, their persona. And so this is what we know that White Hat Way is bringing. We now have Sage, Maria, Adriana, and by the way, Adriana was created in under two hours. I think going forward, it'd be much shorter than that. But the idea is they're, They're Maria and and Adriana are certified. OK, they have created their own certification, completed the test. I don't think anybody's surprised that they scored a one hundred on the test that they created, but they created the content. And that that drives this idea that when you have this baseline of curriculum that is driven off of the principles that you've heard us talk about now for three years on White Hat Way. is that when you have that baseline of education and that approach to business that's what I think people who come to white hat way ai they're going to be the folks who are interested in this long-minded customer relations they do care about the success of the customer and you know it's like I think some of our content looking at yesterday said you know you can't get machines to care right but what you can do is have the machine be an extension of your caring business approach. Okay. So this is part of what, but I think if you had been in the room to hear Adriana, and again, maybe you'll hear that one day soon, you would say that that machine had some level of caring. Okay. Right. Yes. And this is the part that's been fascinating for me, folks, is from the very beginning of working with ChatGBT, I immediately know because Michelle and I, you know, I was jokingly say, we at White Highway, we're just foolish enough to try to make the intangibles tangible. Right. We're over here living in the intangible space. I think it's foolish. I think it's my own self-deprecating thing. But it's like basically I'm just saying it's it's a challenging thing to go take on intangibles in this way. And I think what what we're seeing is that we've now accumulated enough content that. that we can drive these intangible elements and that dealers who subscribe to this approach are going to see a lot of benefit out of the things that, and by the way, we're promoting collaboration. I said at the top, DCS is interested in agreement. And one of the Paragraphs in that understanding is around collaboration on White Hat Way initiatives, and obviously they'll have initiatives, but this will be true with dealers across our ecosystem, all the dealers we work with. We're inviting people to come and be a part of this effort to, in this case, advance artificial intelligence. And that will be ultimately in the analytics realm, right? We will be working on sweeping data for the benefit of the industry. And it really talks about in that little short audio, you heard it say that it can. I forget the phrasing about how it would address day to day dust ups, which I love the phrasing. I love the phrasing. Right. That's a very it's very cowboy. Yeah. But it's I mean, there's a lot of truth to a lot of that. And so the idea is able to have a framework that allows you to approach situations and be consistent in, in, and it's not transactional. It is long-minded and you can absolutely train these machines to be empathetic without giving away the farm. Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, I want to go, we've been talking a lot about voice agents and there's also the, Part of the foundation of that are chat agents. And what we are developing as well is a database for your collectors so that when a question comes along and they're stumped and they want to come up with a couple of different options about how they can resolve the situation, that they can quickly type in to chat gpt we did this when we first started creating sage it was just strictly chat and we asked it about how to handle certain situations and collections and it gave the most beautiful options of how to handle the conversation what the options can be and and all of that and so those kind of things can be can be, you can have universal things and you can also have very based on what your policies and procedures and all of that are. But the cool, really cool thing about it as well is that it's always compliant. What it says is always federally compliant and you can program the AI for whatever state things there are. One of the people in our certification course was Alison Harrison, who is White Hathaway's counsel. And she asked it some pretty hard questions around things that come up that she has had. cases that come around and it just, boom, it got it exactly right and was able to move forward. So, you know, there's just, there's so much, there's so much that we can do. And, you know, it's not scary. No, it's not scary, especially if you're the one programming the values into it. Amen. Yeah. Lean into it, drive it, be able to direct it for your own benefit and And you want to go a step further, learn to drive it for the benefit of your consumers. And you want to talk about the dealers up tomorrow that are going to have the most business. When we can be efficient and compassionate with our customers and help them to be successful, I think you're going to find that AI can help you do that better than you could do it last year or the year before. And so for those people who wish to use that sort of foundational approach to customer relations and what's next and buy here, pay here, I think this is where we have a chance to win folks. And I just think for today, I would just invite all of you out there that are in the technology space, whether you're a dealer who's interested in learning technology, whether you're somebody driving technology and you'd like to work in partnership with White Hat Way, reach out to us. We want to be able to collaborate and work together to, uh, To develop this technology for the benefit of the industry. Because our overarching theme is to change the... distrust to bridge the gap that is a trust gap between consumers and dealers. And part of that is to be able to bring in the empathy and bring in the transparency and bring those things in that you can teach artificial intelligence and they can do it immediately. It takes a little bit longer sometimes with humans to do that. But what it is that we are developing, it's primarily about changing how we interact with our consumers and building trust between consumers and dealers. Yeah. Here's a fun idea. Just thought of it. If you're a dealer and you would like to have an a virtual interview of adriana reach out send me a message let's go to jim at whitehatway.com send a message to me and let me schedule for you a virtual interview of adriana so you can get a feel for what this technology can mean to your business so just again it's not ready to deliver you cannot hire adriana today it's in development you cannot hire adriana today but you can certainly meet adriana and get a feel for where that technology can intersect with your own development. Absolutely. If there's anything that we can help you with, please don't hesitate to call or text us at, or like Jim said, if you'd like to have a conversation with Adriana. Let me introduce you. let us, yeah. And so reach out to us via email for that at jim at whitehatway.com. And we can, we can help out with that. Yeah, for sure. What else do we got? I think that's it. Just a quick reminder. We got Chad Martin, JP Brian going to join us on Friday. So don't miss that one. That'll be a really rich conversation. busy and uh we really appreciate you taking the time to make us a part of your day and if there's a topic that you would like to hear that we haven't haven't discussed or something you would like to hear us discuss about further please don't hesitate to reach out and let us know and um yeah we can we can put it on the agenda to have a conversation all right everybody thanks so much
