Q&A with Tom Thomas
For the first interview in a new series highlighting some of the CX industry’s most influential leaders, we sat down with OneMagnify client Tom Thomas, Vice President, Data Strategy, Analytics & AI at FordDirect. Thomas shared details about his role at FordDirect, how the company’s AI-powered Dealer Co-Pilot program is fast-tracking the dealership’s ability to connect with customers, and his perspective on the future of AI in the automotive industry and beyond.
The following are the views of Mr. Thomas and do not necessarily reflect the views of FordDirect, dealers, or Ford Motor Company.
Q: What is FordDirect?
A: FordDirect is a joint venture between Ford Motor Company and Ford Dealers and Lincoln Retailers. We are majority-owned by Ford Motor Company and majority-controlled by the dealers. Our shared goal is to attract, engage, convert, and retain customers as they interact digitally with the Ford and Lincoln brands at Tier 1, with regional marketing and advertising at Tier 2, and directly with the Ford Dealers and Lincoln Retailers at Tier 3. We strive to ensure both shoppers and owners have a consistent experience throughout the channels, which translates into vehicle sales, service volume, and high customer satisfaction.
Q: What does “customer experience” mean to FordDirect?
A: For FordDirect, it’s about enriching the customer experience on behalf of the dealerships and Ford. One of our core objectives is to leverage our Customer Journey Platform (CJP) data to help dealerships and the brand make a more effective and efficient connection with shoppers and owners.
Q: What prompted you to build the AI-powered Dealer Co-Pilot?
A: We knew we could build a business intelligence (BI) solution that was unique because we had stitched and modeled data together over the years and that it could help the dealerships quickly answer a variety of questions about inventory and demand. They already have this data within their dealerships, but unfortunately, it’s spread across 10 to 12 dashboard systems and not accessible through a single source.
The Dealer Co-Pilot is that single source that allows dealerships to be on their feet engaging directly with customers, while on the lot, amid a test drive, or after hours at home. They don't have to be at their desks or keep going back to open another dashboard to answer a customer question. They can simply go to their mobile device and ask the Dealer Co-Pilot.
Q: What are you hoping to achieve with the Dealer Co-Pilot program?
A: As I mentioned before, our goal has been to maximize the dealership’s and Ford’s ability to make the most efficient and effective connection with Ford and Lincoln shoppers and owners.
The Dealer Co-Pilot is just another channel, in a sense, that helps the dealer directly interact with the customer. It’s also a convenient, single point of access that eliminates time, expense, and hassle. It empowers dealers to make smarter decisions by providing quick answers to customers or to help them in their role at the dealership.
Q: What kind of impact has Dealer Co-Pilot had on the dealers and their day-to-day?
A: Currently, the dealerships are in testing mode – their experience to date with AI in the marketplace has been with customer-facing solutions like a chatbot deployed on their website or email and text generation systems on the backend that are responding to leads.
Since the Co-Pilot is an internally facing AI platform inside the dealership, we are supercharging the understanding of the customer; the demand for their inventory on the lot; service activity; the effectiveness of their marketing and advertising efforts; and summaries of the social media conversation related to the dealership, vehicle models, the Ford brand, and competitive brands.
The Co-Pilot is what’s called a compound generative AI system. It can use data from multiple dealer systems at once to answer a single compound prompt and provide more comprehensive insights by leveraging predictive AI.
Our dealer partners are very enthusiastic about what they’ve seen so far and the potential for Dealer Co-Pilot.
Q: What do you think the future of the Dealer Co-Pilot program looks like?
A: We think a lot about where we are going to take the Co-Pilot next. We have a 2024-25 feature roadmap drafted. Right now, it is a ‘pull’ paradigm where we use it to retrieve information that we and our pilot dealers have already thought about. We need to move it to ‘push’ mode so it can autonomously detect events happening in different systems and trigger an alert or outbound notification.
So, if the Co-Pilot detects the dealership’s Ford Explorer window configurators are running low, it should alert them and ask if they want to order more. Instead of the user logging into the system to place the order, the Co-Pilot can do it with a single tap. Another example is an automatic shift of media spend from the social channel to search once inventory gets too high. The amount of spend shifted would be based on a prediction from our media mix model for the dealer. This is what you would call multi-interactive AI with backend automation.
Q: There is a lot of innovation happening at FordDirect. What do you love about working there and about your role as it relates to innovation in the market?
A: We are a relatively small company, but we are very mighty. There is no other entity like FordDirect. Other companies may have pieces, but nothing is as focused or as clear as FordDirect in its ability to do things at scale across 3,000 dealerships very quickly.
We are highly coordinated from a strategy, technology, and investment standpoint across the OEM, our partners, and our dealer leadership. We have experienced team members across a wide variety of disciplines, and we are nimble enough to help dealerships across a lot of functions. We aren’t constrained to a specific area of the dealer business. It’s really interesting and exciting.
We also have leading-edge technology in place. This achievement has produced multiple analytic solutions that have driven efficiency in media spend for dealerships and Ford and has helped increase vehicle sales and service revenue.
When it comes to my role, I’ve had a lot of freedom to build teams, experiment, and refine our purpose by aligning with our changing business over the past 10 years. I’ve been able to build a comprehensive data, analytics, and AI practice from the ground up, transforming what was a lead reporting function only into a multidisciplinary organization that now encompasses business intelligence, data engineering, machine learning, data science, generative AI, and data governance. Now, as we evolve our AI capability, there’s never a shortage of cool opportunities to pursue.
Q: How do you feel about some predictions that AI solutions may replace human workers?
A: I want to make clear that the Dealer Co-Pilot is not intended to replace dealership employees. It’s meant to replace the more mundane, repetitive, task-oriented operation that will allow dealership personnel to be more cognitively driven – focused on growth, efficiency, and ROI. By automating these non-human-in-the-loop tasks, people can spend their time on more meaningful responsibilities.
I believe this same AI augmentation will apply to most of the labor globally, where we will see a volume reduction in roles where the highest performers and proficient users of AI will remain employed. This aligns with the popular notion that AI will not replace your job, but workers that use AI will. However, some of today’s roles will be replaced completely by AI in the very near future. For example, after the release of GPT 4o and Sora, I feel that jobs like language interpreters, tutors, roles in video production, and image analysis in the healthcare and industrial fields may completely disappear.
Q: When did you start to see the potential of AI?
A: I have a son at the University of Michigan who is a computer science major. A couple of years ago while we were on vacation, he asked if I’d seen Chat GPT 3.0 and showed me how he could prompt it to write Python code right in front of me.
My interest was piqued. I started listening to some of the AI pioneers and started digging into the science side of it. Once it hit mainstream news, there was suddenly an explosion of people talking about it in the analytics circles. I was invited to the 2023 Databricks conference and realized the world was changing. We were seeing the democratization of AI and witnessing a big leap forward. I said, “We can do this at FordDirect. We have the structured and unstructured data in place to start leveraging this for the dealerships.” So last summer, when some of the first open source LLMs became available and manageable within a secure pipeline architecture, I envisioned building a solution to harness the disparate data within the dealership and give it back to them with quick insights they’ve never had before.
But to get full investment buy-in I knew I needed to show, not tell, what the potential could be. So we created a demo using a pre-trained open source LLM. In a little over a month, we were able to let our dealer advisory board play with it and see the potential.
One key reason we are where we are today is because I started exploring something nobody quite understood yet. We created something quick and put our AI ideas and capabilities in front of the dealerships, and they said to keep going. Companies that have not made AI strategic and have been slow to experiment are significantly further behind and may quickly become less competitive.
Q: What AI and CX podcasts are you currently listening to that you’d recommend?
A: I’ve listened to a variety of podcasts and luminaries over the last year or so, now that we are traveling back into the office more often, including:
- Lex Fridman – he has many AI pioneers as guests.
- Sam Altman – often shares his vision of the future to get an idea of what’s on the horizon with Open AI.
- The New York Times’ Hard Fork – relates technology and AI to social trends.
- AI Chat with Jaeden Schafer – almost daily summaries covering both AI startups and large tech events and rumors.
- Gartner’s ThinkCast – does a great job profiling executives who share war stories and key learnings from trying to implement AI in their organizations.
- Max Tegmark – offers scientific perspective on AI models and existential implications.
Q: What CX and data-related issues keep you up at night?
A: Compound AI systems are hard to build and test. The Co-Pilot must produce accurate responses from the dealer’s source-of-truth systems and summarize with generative text and visual content. Single and multi-shot RAG prompting, semantic search, judge LLMs, agents, and function calling are all being brought to bear. There are a wide variety of models and inference techniques to ensure that generated code is really what the user is asking for. But we keep getting better the more creative we are. And it’s just as cool as it is hard, which keeps the energy and excitement up.
In terms of existential stuff, I think the ability to generate misinformation at an extremely high rate is disturbing. Anytime there is a risk that people can become disconnected from reality on a large scale, there is opportunity for mass manipulation. This could obviously have negative effects on geopolitics, the environment, economics, personal liberties, and even the decline in global population. If AI can substitute real human connection enough to keep mortality rates higher than birth rates then we may eventually go extinct. So movies like ‘Her’ can be just as scary as the ‘The Terminator.’
About Tom Thomas, Vice President, Data Strategy, Analytics & AI
Tom Thomas plays the lead role in maximizing FordDirect’s unique position in the automotive industry by providing analytic solutions that measure and drive cross channel and cross tier digital performance so that Ford Motor Company, Ford Dealers, and Lincoln Retailers can make a more effective and efficient connection with their customers.
