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The hunt for auto tech's next unicorn—why Silicon Valley is betting on Toma and what it means for dealers
Featuring Monik Pamecha, CEO of Toma
Welcome to another edition of the Car Dealership Guy Podcast Recap newsletter.
Today’s guest is Monik Pamecha, Founder and CEO at Toma, who discusses how shadowing 400 dealership employees shaped the company’s approach, why AI needs to be trained like a real team member, how Toma resolves 75% of calls without human help, and more.
1. Boots-on-the-ground is the best approach to learning the business.
Monik was literally thrown into the fire to start developing an AI solution to help dealerships better manage their calls.
“We were building like a voice CI product for…hospitals and a dealer in Oklahoma watches the video and he says, ‘I like this, and I want it.’…So my co-founder Anthony and I, we just get on a plane and go to Oklahoma…And he throws us into the deal…seven stores all across the state. And he says…’talk to every single person at every single store and come back to me with what you learned.’”
The experience included speaking to 400 people in a span of a couple of weeks and taking calls at the BDC.
2. Having a bird's eye view of the problem is key.
Working in the BDC department gave Monik and entirely different perspective of the business.
“I think every employee wants to delight customers, at least they begin the morning with that. And as the day goes by, they get jaded. It's like the burden of repetitive stuff, like obviously customers' expectations are off the charts.”
The goal is to reduce the amount of work—with a focus on eliminating repetitive processes.
3. There’s huge value in listening to customers.
Monik’s solution development process focused on improving customer experience by first listening to customers.
“What we started doing was that we heard all the calls and the next thing we did was we built like this prototype that we plugged into the dealership in like a few days that was just talking to customers and we were just listening to the calls all the time…live while a conversation is happening.”
At any point the conversation was going south, they would hit a button, transferring the call to a human—with Anthony developing code on the spot based on those interactions.
4. Dealerships are fertile grounds for developing new ideas.
Moink’s attraction to auto retail lies in all the opportunities it offers tech developers.
“From the outside, like when we looked at a dealership, it just looks like an establishment. It looks like a building, right? But I think when we look deeper inside, we're like, oh my God, you have like 25 departments…You have so many things going on and each one is like a mini company in itself.”
The opportunities in a dealership to develop new ideas to address challenges are massive.
1. Toma - If your BDC or Service Advisors are buried in calls, it’s time for a smarter solution. Toma builds custom AI agents that answer 100% of your dealership’s inbound calls and handle tasks like booking service, checking recalls, and scheduling test drives—without tying up your team. Dealers using Toma are saving 30–40 staff hours a week and booking 100+ extra appointments every month. Exclusive for CDG Listeners: Start your no-risk, 1-month free trial at toma.com/cdg.
2. Lotlinx - Get the best possible market advantage on every vehicle transaction. Optimize operations and boost profits using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. Learn more at lotlinx.com.
3. Qmerit - Selling EVs can have a lot of friction points. But home charging installation shouldn’t be one of them. That’s why dealers and automakers trust Qmerit—the go-to expert for home charging installations. Join Qmerit’s dealership partner program and start earning referral incentives on every installation. Visit at qmerit.com/carguy to learn more.
5. Customer experience is an area of great concern.
The approach that many dealerships take with customers can be extremely cumbersome—whether they are buying a car or servicing their vehicle.
“For something as perennial as water, like cars are everywhere, ⁓ it was pretty crazy to us that the customer experience has always been overlooked in the business. It's broken…like, for example, when they're buying; when they're looking at cars; when they're like checking out websites—they're flooded with pop-ups, nonstop. When they get into the store, like they look at something, they go back home, they're confused, because…they're not getting the right…information that they…wanted.”
There is a lot of ping pong between the dealership and customers.
6. The rapid growth of Toma is a testament to its viability.
Toma has quickly become a go-to company for improving the customer experience.
“For the longest time, we didn't even have any sales employees at all at our company. Our only goal was to build a great product which helps improve the customer experience…Our first dealers liked our product and they went into their 20 group and they told other dealers about it. And that's really all of our growth.”
Word of mouth has been Toma’s greatest marketing tool.
7. Knowing that all dealerships aren’t the same is important.
Monik does not believe in a one solution fits all approach.
“That's the same reason why there's no model Honda dealership or model Audi dealership…Each one adapts to its own demographics. It's like you have this working knowledge of your customers, what people like, and you…distill it and put that…into your operations.”
The same is true of AI.
8. Customers are becoming more receptive to AI assistants.
Monik has seen a dramatic shift in how customers respond to the tech.
“…when we started, like I would say that the percentage of people who let's say immediately will listen to an AI and be like, want a human was…around 20%...but over time we've seen that number drop to like about 4%.”
The use of AI assistants by other business and service operations like hospitals and travel-related companies helping to drive the wider adoption of the tech.
9. Keeping the innovation pipeline flowing.
Monik has had massive success raising funding to expand his business, which he attributes a large part to the validation he receives from customers.
“…dealers coming to me and saying, ‘this is great, I'm gonna tell my friend about it,’ is really the signal that we were looking for and we got that. And I think that's when we doubled down on our conviction in the automotive business...we're like, wow, we've only solved like maybe 1% of the problems there are that we've come across.”
That resonates with investors as well.
10. The industry just starting to grasp the potential of AI.
There's no doubt that AI is going to change the way auto retail operates in ways never imagined down the road.
“...we've wanted to have a say in that, especially for the automotive business, because…on the retail side, have so many problems that…once you've understood how it works and how to implement it, you start framing all the problems that you see around...as some sort of an abstraction of this solution that you have in your head.”
Investors see that vision and the ability for AI to solve a wealth of problems and make auto retail much more efficient for dealers and customers in ways that weren’t possible up until five years ago.
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