Talk to us a little bit about that because obviously all of this makes sense and to treat the dealership as one.

I look at DriveCentric as four fundamental platforms consolidated into an engagement platform.

So at the heart of it, if you think of an engagement platform, what does that make up? Well, at one end, it is traditional CRM.

I've got to be able to manage leads.

The servicers have leads.

Somebody's looking to do a repair order, that's a lead.

And if they don't complete the repair order, then you have an abandoned shopper or a follow-up, which is also a lead.

Why do you think this matters more for dealerships right now? Here we are in the middle of the second quarter, 2026, than it did even just a few years ago.

If, if the service to sales agent works exactly as intended a year from now and you make continuous improvements, uh, as, as I know you will, what does that actually do to a dealer's fixed ops to sales pipeline?

Optionality is still huge, right? Driving loyalty, uh, within a dealership is a huge focal point for me.

So, you know, we fully anticipate by the end of the year, four or five hundred, uh, you know, dealerships using, uh, that specific app.

That'll probably put us over three thousand dealerships in the country using one of our agentic AI agents, if not all of our agents.

And then we are adding a hundred to a hundred and fifty dealerships every month from there.

So, you know, the depth of information we'll have, the depth of consumer behavior that we'll have, I think will be untouched.

To be able to kind of understand what are the right triggers that get somebody.

If I'm a dealer principal with one budget line to spend on technology over the course of the next 12 months, what's the argument for spending it with DriveCentric?

Excited about

it.

Yes, I'm equally as excited about it.

You know, DriveCentric, we started six years ago into this entry into AI.

So we have a product that's natively built called Genius.

And Genius was the foundation that really propelled DriveCentric to another level.

We had...

I'm wondering, are you hiring, and what are you looking for in the hiring? Are there characteristics or skills that you particularly want?

... and assessing the market need and sending these people to dealerships?

So I think that that's a path, and people could go down that path.

It's expensive.

You have to have a managed service department.

You have to have, like, deployed engineers and human capital that you're investing in.

You know, the way I think of the industry, where it's gonna head, uh, you know, it started...

I'll go through the history where I see the last five years of the history of kind of this, "I wanna control my own data." What happened? Dealerships were saying, "I wanna control my first-party data.

It seems to be that they actually, you know, went off the, their CRM in, in their case.

built

a really good product, a great company.

And my hat's off to them.

What they did, the grind they did, the work ethic they had, the foresight they had.

Building a company, starting a company, that's not easy.

And it takes years to get it to a point where you can really start to grow it.

And they did a great thing.

I don't understand, answer the question, why would somebody, you know why people are on DriveCentric, why are people not?

How did that happen? How did you end up in that journey, leaving college to the time you entered retail automotive to where it brought you here?

You know, the quick version of it is I wanted to be in business.

I got a finance degree at the Eller School of Management out of University of Arizona.

The reason I went there was it's actually the only place you get a finance degree in four years.

I usually go on to study finance because I wanted to go work on Wall Street.

And you can go to a UC system.

And I grew up in San Diego and get a finance degree.

I know Marco very

Talk to us a little bit about that because obviously all of this makes sense and to treat the dealership as one.

I look at DriveCentric as four fundamental platforms consolidated into an engagement platform.

So at the heart of it, if you think of an engagement platform, what does that make up? Well, at one end, it is traditional CRM.

I got to be able to manage leads.

The service advisor had leads that, you know, somebody is looking to do a repair order.

That's a lead.

And if they don't complete the repair order, then you have an abandoned shopper or a follow up, which is also a lead.

Why do you think this matters more for dealerships right now? Here we are in the middle of the second quarter, 2026, than it did even just a few years ago.

So I want to think about the last three years or three to four years when you decided to take on big CRM, let's call it, for For all intents and purposes, what drove you to this space? Well,

first of all, I love your platform and I love the concept of Circle.

So it's great to hear that we're mentioned a lot there.

It means a lot to us.

And it is definitely one of the things knowing this industry really well, knowing the auto tech software industry really well.

I studied it.

I've been learning it.

have