In 2025 my son moved to France to start a family and had our first grandchild. I wanted a way to fund regular trips there for my wife and our two daughters, so I began looking seriously at the AI wave. After going through most of a 60-hour course by Liam Ottley, I called a friend of nearly 33 years, John Funchess, and we started AI Digital Workers Inc.What we didn’t know at the time was that John’s sister Pam—a 32-year Ford veteran who rose to the national Director level—was already thinking about what we were building. She has since come on as our advisor and is planning to join full-time as VP of Automotive. That domain knowledge has shaped everything we do for dealerships.Most AI in auto is still focused on phone agents for inbound or outbound calls. We took a different path and built a true omnichannel conversational system that lives on the dealer’s website and social channels—especially on the vehicle detail pages where most buyers actually start their journey. Instead of a basic chatbot that requires typing and waiting, our agents have a natural-language conversation. They can answer any question about the full inventory, send pre-approval links, capture a complete customer profile for the sales team, book the appointment, and push everything into the CRM and calendar with confirmations and reminders.We haven’t found a single dealer running anything like this yet. It’s the difference between a website you click and read and one you can actually talk to—like moving from the telegram to the telephone.

I began making cold calls to Dealerships after we got several of our key innovations for the omnichannel solution approved for use on dealership webites by Ford Direct and Cox Automotive. We are now in dialogues with 3 dealerships. 2 from cold calling and one a hand off from Pam, Director at Ford Direct. We are working through the process of doing multiple demonstrations and believe we will have most or all of these dealers under contract within a week or two.

One decision that changed our direction was how we responded when a dealer told us he already had a phone AI vendor under contract. Instead of walking away, we asked whether he’d be interested in a voice agent on the website itself—especially on the vehicle detail pages. He said yes, but only if he could see a demo.That was the pivot. Rather than build a lightweight demo, we decided to build the full production system and then demonstrate the real thing. At the same time, we made a second choice: before going deep with dealers, we would get the concept approved by Ford and by Cox Automotive. We didn’t want to spend months building something a dealer liked that either of those two could later shut down.That decision redirected the company from being another phone-agent shop into building a true omnichannel conversational layer that lives on the dealer’s website and social channels. Now, when we get GMs and owners on the phone, the Ford and Cox approval immediately gives us credibility. We do a two-minute overview, ask for a 15-minute demo, and we’re consistently getting those meetings. It’s the most advanced interactive website upgrade most of them have seen.The mistake that taught me the most was earlier in the same period: we were still treating phone agents as the main opportunity. We almost stayed in a crowded lane because that’s what everyone else was selling. The lesson was to stop leading with the technology we already knew how to talk about and start listening for the gap the customer actually felt. Once we did that, the bigger opportunity became obvious.

Over the last couple of years, two things have shifted at the same time. First, generative AI made truly natural conversation practical and affordable. Second, car buyers started expecting that level of interaction everywhere they research—not just when they call the dealership. They want to ask detailed questions about a specific vehicle, get real answers, and move toward an appointment without having to type into a basic chatbot or wait for a salesperson to call them back.Most of the industry responded by putting AI agents on the phones. That’s useful, but it still leaves the website—the place where the majority of buyers actually begin their journey—largely unchanged. Vehicle detail pages still rely on forms, static content, or old-style chat widgets that force people to type and wait.We adapted by treating the website and the vehicle detail page as the primary channel instead of an afterthought. We built production-grade conversational voice agents and video agents that live right on those pages and can speak naturally about the entire inventory, capture a full customer profile, send pre-approval links, and book appointments directly into the CRM and calendar. At the same time, we made sure the approach was approved by Ford and Cox Automotive so dealers could actually deploy it without risk.The result is that we’re no longer competing in the crowded phone-agent category. We’re giving dealers a way to meet the new buyer expectation at the exact moment it matters most—while the customer is already on the page looking at a car.

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