Leaders from AgRevolution, Agriteer, Young’s Equipment, LoneStar Ag, KanEquip and more gathered in Rosemont, Ill., for the inaugural ViNE Event, hosted by the Vi by visorPRO team. The event featured dealer-focused educational and interactive sessions on the challenges, benefits and best practices for implementing AI at the dealership. Rob Saik, founder and CEO of Vi by visorPRO, says the idea for the event came about during a discussion with Brion Torgerson from Torgerson’s Equipment in Great Falls, Mont.
“At the Precision Farming Dealer Summit in St. Louis in January, I was on stage and we talked about having an AI academy for dealerships,” Saik says. “It was in Montana when I was talking about AI and visorPRO at one of the dealerships, Brion Torgerson came up to me and said, ‘We need more than using visorPRO, we also need to think about AI integration.’ And that was the genesis of the idea. So, we took that idea and decided to move forward with a very select and small group of dealers to talk about AI leadership inside of dealerships, what they're doing, how they're implementing it, where the gaps are, where do they want to go. And so that's why we invited people from Texas and Saskatchewan and Kentucky and Pennsylvania and Indiana and Ohio here to talk about that at the dealership level.
“One of the things we shared this morning is of course the industry is undergoing constraints right now. And so how do we use technology to level up our people, do more with less, do more faster? AI is capable of doing that. And to think about AI as an operating system for the dealership with pipelines coming in to the operating system and output depending on what department, whether it's aftermarket sales, whether it's finance or admin, like what do you want coming out of AI? And it really is not so much an AI discussion as it's a data discussion.”
Saik also offered some words of advice for dealers interested in implementing AI.
“The key is just to start,” he says. “So, if somebody hasn't even played with AI at all and they're wondering, should I go to Claude and Anthropic or should I go to OpenAI, Grok or Gemini? The answer is yes. But a good starting point that I've used with a lot of people is Perplexity. Just download Perplexity. And once you download Perplexity, which has a lot of the frontier models built into it, you'll use Perplexity and you'll never go back to Google search because Perplexity has a reference beside every single line in it and that's like visorPRO, which will not fabricate an answer. VisorPRO is going to pull the information from the original equipment manufacturer, the mainline or shortline is going to combine that with the legacy work orders from the dealer management system and combine that with dealership knowledge in that ‘dealer vault’ to extract information necessary to solve a service or parts problem.”
Stay tuned for more coverage from the ViNE Event and AI insights gleaned in the coming days on PrecisionFarmingDealer.com.
