Adam Torres and Rob Saik discuss the Associated Equipment Distributor’s Annual Summit.
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Show Notes:
Listen to the Associated Equipment Distributor’s annual summit coverage. In this episode, Adam Torres interviews Rob Saik, Founder & CEO at visorPRO, explore visorPRO and the Associated Equipment Distributor’s annual summit thanks to the support of our sponsor, Vanguard Captive Management.
About Rob Saik
There are few professionals that can combine their passion of agriculture with deep business experience and talk about them in a humorous, energetic and impactful way…Rob Saik is one of those guys.
An author, keynote, entrepreneur and thought leader, Rob has been tapped by the likes of the Minister of Agriculture for Nigeria and most recently the FAO_UN Committee for World Food Security.
Beginning his career on a mixed farm in Alberta, Rob has gone on to found and invest in many companies in the agricultural sector ranging from farming in Uganda, cattle, ag retail, fertilizer manufacturing, distribution, marketing, consulting, data, ag tech, robotics and now serves as CEO of AGvisorPRO, a connectivity and resource platform for agriculture.
About visorPRO
Vi by visorPRO® empowers Technicians to do their best work by helping them respond quickly to the endless and repetitive customer support tickets coming in, letting them focus on bigger problems.
Techs can ask our powerful AI any support query question through our chat interface. Vi finds the perfect answer by referencing a secure database customized just for you.
With a response in just 30 seconds, Vi will also reference the material it used to generate the response, ensuring accuracy.
Watch Full Interview:
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres and today we are in Orlando, Florida at the AED Summit. And my guest is Rob Saik of VisorPro. This episode is sponsored to you by, is brought to you by Vanguard Captive Management. Learn more about Vanguard over at vancap.
com. Rob, welcome to the show. Hey Adam. Hey buddy. Alright, so excited about it. I’ll let you, I’ll be up front. This is my very first. But you, you just came from CES. I did just come from CES, but for yourself, have you been coming to AED Summit in the past or? Well, this is a fairly new company. I’ve had a several startups, uh, in the, in the technology world.
This is the first big summit. We were at a AED event in Arizona. So this would be number two for us. Tell us a little bit about what draws you back to the organization, just AED in general. Well, our, our application could go cross sector. So this AED, uh, associated equipment distributors has everything from construction, forestry to agriculture, to probably even touching on oil and gas.
And that, that also dovetails quite nicely into what we’re working with. So I do want to get further into advisor pro and I definitely want to know about the current company. But before we do that, let’s go back a little bit. Have you always been an entrepreneur? Yep. Pretty much from 14 years old, I started farming and built several businesses.
Adam, the most significant ones, like I’ve had a lot of businesses, the most significant being an exit to Trimble, which is out of Sunnyvale, California. Uh, it was a 20 year journey with a company called AgriTrend and AgriData that I, that I built and sold. And the second one was, I was CEO of a robotics company, and we sold that to Raven Industries, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, that ultimately became part of Case, New Holland.
Now. Some of the young entrepreneurs out there that are just getting started. So for, for our YouTube audience, like what in today’s age, we got AI, we got technology, we got all these things happening. If you could like, just look back in time, you know, Robin, you’re just getting started all over again. You don’t maybe know everything, you know, today, what kind of advice would you give to that next group of entrepreneurs?
You know, a lot of times we talk, Adam, about entrepreneurs having vision. It’s actually beyond that. An entrepreneur sees the invisible. So when you see the invisible, you see something that the rest of the crowd doesn’t see. It takes a lot of guts. Uh, you know, if I had one word that really expressed what it takes to be an entrepreneur, it would be persistence or stubbornness or confidence, but stubbornness, because you really do have to live through a whole lot of lows.
You know, there’s some highs, but there’s lots of lows and it takes a great deal of fortitude. Uh, any entrepreneur who’s starting. I hat off to you, uh, but it is, it’s not an easy road to home. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Because a lot of, a lot of people that tune into this show, they’re thinking, you know, we’re going to have all this inspiration, this, that, Hey, we tell the truth over here.
If you’re going to be an entrepreneur, it’s not, it’s not easy. Roll up your sleeves, get ready to work with whiteboards and folding tables and chairs. And that’s what it takes. And a lot, you know, what does it say? 10 years to become an overnight success. And that is not all that far off the truth. So let’s get into a little bit about the main event.
What brings us here? You’re here today. So visor pro, like talk to me about the company. Yeah. So, you know, you guys are big on mission. And so I’ve written a couple of books on agriculture, agriculture technology, both of them having a chapter on AI and I follow Peter Diamandis and I’m a member of abundance 360.
So I’ve been following AI for quite a while. What does it really mean? Well, we started to look at applying AI in the agriculture sector and found out it wasn’t very good. Cause agriculture is so nuanced. However, when we started applying AI into the dealership sector, the heavy equipment sector, working with the owners of the dealerships and trying to solve some of their pain points, we, it was like lightning in a bottle.
This is really, really exciting. Did that surprise you? I’m curious. Like when you started digging. What, what surprised me is AI fabricating stuff. Right. And it does. Yeah. Bye. But when you confine the AI to a known set of information, and you can extract answers from that known set of information, it goes beyond AI.
It goes to specific, like SI, specific intelligence. And so, what we’re unveiling here at the show is something called Dealer Brain, and we’re going into the business systems of the dealership, and we can extract, you know, if that transmission job has been done 25 times. Most of the time the technicians don’t have the ability to go back and extract the legacy data.
We can extract the legacy data of those work orders, how much time was spent, how much it cost, what the quotation should be, what the parts are, what the safety precautions are, who the technicians that were working on it before. And like I said, I’m pretty excited about this because this is like lightning in a bottle.
We help to build the dealer brain. We also build a vault for the dealer where we can bring the data. in their, their manuals and extract answers very quickly. And to me, it’s really exciting, uh, to be on the forefront of leveraging large language models and artificial intelligence in a blue collar industry.
Like that’s, that’s, that’s what, that’s me. I’m, I’m leveraging it inside of a blue collar industry. It’s very exciting. And the market is massive. Yeah. What were some of those original pain points that you found maybe dealers had or that led to like you, you know, step by step like, Oh, this is the lightning in their body you described.
What were some of those pain points you were solving? Well, a simple one would be a farmer walking up to a parts counter and running into farmer. Fred asked Pete, the partsman, what is the engine oil capacity, the type of the change interval? Now Pete is just staring at the farmers, probably going to tap on Sam servicemen’s shoulders and ask the question.
You can ask Vi, and Vi will spit out the answer instantaneously, saving all of that time in the dealership. That’s a pretty, that’s a pretty shallow example, but a really good one. No, that’s helpful though. And then, if you’re a technician in the field, and you’re dealing with, I’m staring at a, uh, a bucket right now, like a forklift or something that’s got a bucket, and the bucket keeps sliding down, and that technician’s trying to solve the problem, well, it’s, troubleshooting is really hard, isn’t it?
Yeah. Right? Yeah. So, if you have the, Wisdom of all the past troubleshootings that have happened inside the dealership. And it’s available at your fingertips. You make Terry, the technician who’s 20 years old, look really good because Sam, the serviceman who’s got silver hair and is 70 has put his information into the dealer vault, building the dealer brain.
This is the specific intelligence that we’re building with visor pro. And it seems to me like, correct me if I’m wrong. But as time. Time goes on, and as companies are working with this, and it’s been there longer, and they have the, and the record, it’s pulling more and more data, it should get smarter. Like more insights and more things that are gonna come up, even in the future as technologies change.
Well it will, and, and you know, categorically all the data belongs to the dealer. The dealer. Yeah, all the dealer. It’s their data, I understand. So, so, call it the axles, the differential, the driveshaft, the transmission, all belongs to the dealer. Yes. We reserve the right to swap out the engine. So right now we’re working with CHOT for Xero Enterprise, but we do have Just as easily could swap out that engine and AI is advancing so fast.
But my take on this, Adam, is that the dealer should have a strategy for developing an AI for their business. And that’s really how we’re surrounding the dealer to become that strategic partner of choice. I think that’s what we’re after. What has been your response so far? Cause I love the concept, by the way, just overall, like AI to blue collar, like industries in general.
And so what’s been the response? Good. I mean, we started working with, uh, some of the, uh, case, uh, case dealerships in North America. So we brought on some, uh, Young’s equipment as Saskatchewan. We brought on Torgeson’s out of, uh, Montana, Wyoming, uh, Mazer group, the largest new Holland dealership in Canada.
We’ve got Burnham’s out of Michigan, Ohio, and the largest new Holland dealership out of Australia, McIntosh and son. And I just came back from Argentina where I did a bunch of calls in Argentina. And again, like it’s kind of. Yeah, this is really cool, man. That is exciting. Well, I’ll tell you, um, I’m excited to continue to follow this story, but for today, I know big conference got a lot to do.
Appreciate you making time for me today. Um, what I want you to do next is look into the camera. How do people follow up? How do they learn more? How do they follow the journey? Yeah, I think the simplest way is of course, a website. Uh, so www dot visor pro. ai. So that’s one you’ll find us on LinkedIn vibe by visor pro.
And if they go to the website, uh, visorpro. ai. They can throw their name in and, uh, you know, and, and we’ll do a demo. It Adam is 15 minutes, 15 minutes. And you get this, uh, on social media, you can follow me at, at our psych on X R S a I K. Uh, I’m all over the place. I’ve got lots of social media. We’ll be really excited to amplify what you’re doing.
Amazing. Good work. And for everybody that’s watching, just so you know, we’ll definitely put the links in the show notes. So you can just go on over and check out. by and follow the journey of Rob and his company. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with mission matters, and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button.
This is a daily show each and every day. We’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way on your journey. So again, hit that subscribe or follow button. And, and also again, a big thanks to our sponsors over at Vanguard captive management. So go check out vancap.
com and check them out as well. And, uh, Rob, Thank you again so much. Thanks a lot, Adam. Great.