John Schmeiser joined the Vi by visorPRO team after nearly 30 years with the North American Equipment Dealers Association (NAEDA) because he saw first-hand how impactful AI can be for dealerships.

“A presenter at Farm Equipment’s Dealership Minds Summit back in August said that a dealership’s future success is going to be determined by what level of AI they’ve adopted into their business,” Schmeiser says. “AI can reduce frustrations and at the same time increase absorption rates, dealership profitability, efficiency and customer satisfaction.”

Vi by visorPRO is a dealer-centric AI solution that’s shortline friendly and colorblind, says Rob Saik, founder and CEO of visorPRO. It’s gaining traction in farm equipment dealerships across the U.S., Canada and Australia, with growing interest from Latin America and other global markets.

“We’ve been in the market for almost a full year commercially, and in this rapidly changing AI space, that means a lot,” Saik says. “Vi is a game-changer for the equipment sector. We’re excited to see the rapid adoption and the impact it’s having on customer service and technical support.”

With Vi, dealers have exclusive access to their own Vault, which contains information from uploaded work orders, OEM service manuals, bulletins and more. Dealers can ask Vi a question about a piece of equipment, and it will extract a referenceable answer from the Vault in a matter of seconds.

“The Vault is a single repository for all the service documents your dealership has,” says Brock Moir, CPO, visorPRO. “We secure it for you and make sure it’s private for your dealership. The decision maker at the dealership can decide who has access to it, whether it’s service managers, technicians, or sales and parts people.”

WATCH: The visorPRO team dives into the impact of AI on dealers and Vi in a recent Precision Farming Dealer webinar

The Vault is evolving into the dealerBrain — launching in late 2024 — which will capture exclusive insights from key players that can't be found in a service manual.

“The Brain is all about leveraging institutional knowledge at the dealership,” Moir says. “Having the ability to share that knowledge and information across the dealership group is really impactful because right now it’s either trapped in the head of senior technicians or in the business system.”

The dealerBrain will also soon include work order integration. The plan is for Vi to be a one-stop shop for all the service documents at a dealership. Dealers can ask Vi a question about a piece of equipment, and it will put together an answer using relevant information from previous work orders.

“Vi can take summaries from several different technician stories and put them together to write a more cohesive story about a repair job,” says Wilson Schultz, product manager, visorPRO. “We see this as a big benefit for technicians, just to be able to read a quick summary before they dive into a job. They’re likely going to find something in there that they aren’t thinking about before and it’s going to make their work more efficient.”

Torgerson’s Equipment — a dealer with 16 locations in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming — became the first CNH dealer to use visorPRO’s AI technology in 2023. Brion Torgerson, CEO of Torgerson’s, says the technology has been a game-changer for technician onboarding and speeds the service process up immensely, especially during busy season.

“Speed has always been the number one thing we hear about from our dealer customers,” Schultz says. “With Vi, you can get an answer to something within 15-20 seconds, that previously would’ve taken 10-15 minutes before. The ability to find shortline information has been critical as well. They’d look for a piece of shortline information for days, and if you can shave that down to 30 seconds with Vi, then it makes a huge difference.”

“We’re just scratching the surface of where this technology can go,” Moir adds. “In the next 5 years, I think Vi will change quite a bit as the technology develops. Where we see this going is Vi having the ability to have a full idea of what’s going on in the service department, so that any problem that comes in, Vi can help while you’re dealing with the problem, whether you’re on the phone with customers or troubleshooting it with peers. AI is going to bleed into every aspect of our lives in very interesting ways, so if you’re not thinking about where the future of AI is going for your business, now is the time to start because it’s going to be impactful."

Click here to watch a recent Precision Farming Dealer webinar on how Vi works, what it takes to implement the system at your dealership and where AI technology is headed in the coming years.