From technician to service manager to now chief technology officer, Layne Richins has pretty much seen it all in his 20-plus year career with Stotz Equipment. And now he’s at the forefront of implementing AI at the 24-store John Deere dealership. I caught up with Richins to get some insights on how they got started with AI.   

“We partnered with a company called Mainstreet AI, and they just helped guide us in our business and try to give us some safe AI tools. At the end of the day, we all know that AI is awesome, but you’ve got to use it responsibly. You’ve got to use it in a way that's safe and conscious of where that data is and where that data's going. So I think there was a lot of hesitation initially, but when we partnered with Mainstreet AI, they were basically a consultant with us and trying to help us understand what we could do, as well as what tools we could enable for all of our users and make it quick and easy for them to start utilizing AI in a safe manner.”

“And one of the first things was just getting what we called the StotzGPT instead of ChatGPT. And it was our own ChatGPT that we allowed everyone access to, and we connected it to all of our internal documents. So, it had business knowledge about Stotz Equipment so people could then start chatting in there and asking questions. If you wanted to know anything about insurance benefits or wanted to know about a process or whatever, it was connected to our data. So, then we were using those language models to try to figure out how can we become more efficient and how can we utilize it in a way that's going to help us? And Mainstreet AI was really the key to helping us figure that out”

Stotz Equipment has a data analytics team that’s exploring how to use AI to help build reports for customers. Catch our full conversation with Richins on the latest episode of the Precision Farming Dealer podcast.