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AI = Awesome Intelligence

My brother and I both work in IT. He works at a large dealership that uses DealerTrack.

Certain departments had to physically print docs just to scan them back in and email them. DealerTrack (and possibiy other older apps that “require Lexmark printers”) forces a physical print job to get the right logos and forms on things like statements of account and tech cards. It’s simply due to the application was built back when the norm was send logos/forms to Lexmark printers cache, then for all future prints just send the text and a code for the form, the actual printer adds that during the print.

We already knew how to program from earlier jobs, but both are in more of an IT leadership role now. With Claude AI we built something that captures any of those print jobs out of the DMS and turns them into a PDF instead of sending them to a printer.

Several departments use it every day now. After about 10 years of print → scan → PDF because of a simple software limitation, they now get the PDF instantly because AI makes coding 100x faster.

Would have taken years without AI.
 

✨ AI Highlights

  • Claude and Gemini replaced ChatGPT for coding, planning, and research tasks
  • AI avatars with cloned voices fooled real people including spouses
  • Dealers built agents to stock inventory and find auction vehicles autonomously

Dealers and vendors share practical AI wins in this open-ended thread, covering voice-to-text tools like MacWhisper and self-hosted Whisper models, a real-time video avatar concept for lead capture, and MCP integrations connecting ChatGPT and Claude to dealership data platforms. A standout insight from joe.pistell warns that too many Claude skills and plugins can 'oversteer' the model and degrade output quality, while a practical prompt using simplified technical English (ASD-STE100) gets praise as a way to extract clearer answers after complex AI research sessions.

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