Eric Rea

"An Army of Experts!" – The End of Software as We Know It + Reacting to Live Dealer Comments | Pre-NADA AI #7 My conversation with @ericwilliamrea, CEO of @PodiumHQ. 1:08 How is AI changing dealerships? 4:03 What are the software challenges in dealerships? 6:42 How is AI added to dealerships? 18:45 How does AI personalize customer service? 19:14 What makes a CRM good? 20:03 What is the future of AI? 25:30 How does voice AI help service? 30:07 What are the upcoming plans for Podium?

We just crossed $100M in AI agent ARR in under 24 months. Not because of a viral launch or AI hype. But because of a crazy bet we made in 2023. At the end of 2023, over 60k local businesses were using @PodiumHQ to centralize their leads and customer communication into one platform. It’s a great product. Customers convert more leads and make more money with it. But one reality became impossible to ignore: Our customers’ biggest constraint isn’t software. It’s staffing. → 75% annual turnover → 30% of leads come after hours → Every missed call can be $20,000+ in lost revenue Business owners don’t care about software. They care about making money. And the best software in the world doesn’t matter if there aren’t enough people to run it. So we built Jerry, the perfect user of our own platform. Not a chatbot. An AI employee that uses Podium to: - Qualify and schedule every lead - Handle objections and follow up - Learn through natural-language coaching - Work 24/7 Demos are easy. Real AI employees are not. To work in the real world, AI has to think, act, understand context, and use tools. It has to handle thousands of edge cases every day. It has to be coachable. Like a human. That leap is enormous. Agents aren’t a feature. They’re the foundation. That’s why we rebuilt Podium as an AI-first system of agents. Today: - 10,000+ AI agents live in production - AI now outperforms humans in many jobs - $100M+ in AI agent ARR, and accelerating This is still day one. The future isn’t software. It's AI employees that do the work and unlock growth for businesses. We’re early in building what we believe will become the most impactful AI employee ecosystem for the $3T SMB market. We’ve seen 300% year-over-year AI revenue growth and we’re just getting started.

I’ve been in venture capital for ~2 decades and have sat on many boards, and I’ve never seen the kind of transformation @PodiumHQ just engineered: Annual cash burn went from $95M to $0. AI ARR went $0M to $100M — in 21 months. Here’s what happened… @PodiumHQ had built a communications product for small businesses. It worked, but coming out of the ZIRP era, growth was flattening. We were at a critical moment, Pre-ChatGPT: Was the product a nice-to-have or a need-to-have? It was a problem that needed solving. @ericwilliamrea went into Founder Mode to create a clear need-to-have product. Experimenting with AI in 2023 wasn’t controversial. But as board members, we weren’t sure the product would work or the revenue would stick. Would all of these customers churn? Then @PodiumHQ management made the call: invest more time and money into R&D before hyping the product or going big on GTM. In the first three months, something was clearly different. We’d launched plenty of products before. Nothing had ever taken off this fast. As board members, we wondered (as board members tend to do): was there a catch? Nope. And another three months in, still no catch. Just real value. And now, here we are, 21 months later and AI agent ARR rocketed from $0 to $100M, our overall ARR growth rate is way up and @PodiumHQ has gone from burning $95M a year to $0M. That “AI chatbot” experiment became @PodiumHQ's top employee, singlehandedly driving $100M in ARR. His name is Jerry. Jerry is a customer service agent for auto, home services & wellness businesses. Customers often walk in asking to speak with him. He has hundreds of 5-star Google reviews. He even won “Employee of the Month” 😅Why? Jerry answers text/voice 24/7/365 within ~30 secs. Customers using @PodiumHQ’s Jerry 2.0 are seeing a 30% revenue lift.🚀 Not to mention…Jerry 2.0 can be coached up to any subject in ~60 seconds. I couldn’t be more impressed with CEO @ericwilliamrea and the @PodiumHQ team, who understood that the qualities that make a great AI agent are the same as those that make a great human employee: Knowing the job, industry and playbook, can be coached and work tirelessly. No wonder @OpenAI made Jerry 2.0 a case study: Zero to $100M ARR in 21 months, in > 10,000 customer locations. I’ve watched this go from early conviction to undeniable traction. The market is voting. Find the @OpenAI case study here: openai.com/index/podium /END