Quotes drafted, invoices chased, the Monday report built.
Last service: 2026-07-12
For an equipment dealer, AI automation means handing the repetitive parts of quoting, follow-up, parts lookups, and reporting to software that runs on a schedule and gets checked like a machine. We build those systems for $5,000 to $15,000 at a fixed price, starting with a $2,500 audit that maps where your hours go and what they cost (the first three clients pay $1,000). Jake is a P.E. who ran a commercial CO2 plant, so dealerships are home turf.
Where the hours go at a dealership
Walk the counter at most dealerships and the pattern repeats. A quote request comes in, someone pulls the spec sheet, checks the price book, checks what that customer paid last time, and retypes it all into a document. Do that for every request in a week and quoting alone becomes somebody's side job.
Then there is everything after the quote. Following up on the ones that went quiet. Scheduling service around techs and parts that are never in the same place at the same time. Looking up part numbers across systems that do not talk to each other. Chasing past-due invoices. Building the inventory report that is due every Monday. None of it is hard, and all of it takes hours from the people you would rather have selling.
What we build for dealers
Most of what a dealership runs on is structured, repetitive, and stuck in someone's head or inbox. That is exactly the kind of work that automates well. Every system is fixed scope and fixed price, $5,000 to $15,000, built on accounts you own.
Nothing customer-facing goes out without a person approving it. The point is to take the assembly work off your desk, not to let a robot talk to your customers unsupervised.
- Quote drafts assembled from your spec sheets and price books, ready for a person to check and send
- Follow-up drafts on aging quotes, queued for approval instead of forgotten
- Service scheduling that flags conflicts and missing parts before the truck rolls
- Parts lookups that answer from your own catalogs and history instead of a folder hunt
- Collection reminders drafted for past-due invoices, so AR chasing stops depending on someone's memory
- Inventory and pipeline reports that arrive already built, on the schedule you set
Home turf for a plant engineer
I am Jake O'Donnell, a plant engineer before any of this, so I have spent plenty of time on your side of the counter, reading spec sheets, waiting on quotes, and dealing with the vendor who never called back.
I ran my own automation the way you would run a shop floor. I started the fleet in February 2026. By June it had grown to about 70 scheduled jobs and passed 10,000 logged runs. The plate below shows what it is doing right now. You would not buy a machine without seeing its runtime history, and you should not buy automation that way either.
O'Donnell AI is one person in Charleston, South Carolina, serving the state and the Southeast, on-site when the work calls for it. Small on purpose.
Pricing and ownership
For a dealership the map usually starts at the quote counter. The audit is $1,000 for the first three clients, built systems run $5,000 to $15,000 fixed price, and the monthly watch is $1,500 to $2,000. Every number is on one page.
You own the accounts, the keys, the data, and everything we build. AI usage costs pass through at cost with no markup. If you leave, everything stays yours and keeps working.
Questions we hear
What does the AI Ops Audit cost for a dealership?
It is $2,500 flat and takes about two weeks. You get a written map of the automatable work in your dealership with time savings put in dollars, plus one quick win implemented before the report lands. The first three clients pay $1,000. We are new and need case studies we can publish.
Will this work with our dealer management system?
We build on the accounts and software you already own rather than asking you to switch. Whether your DMS, email, and accounting tools expose what an automation needs is exactly what the audit checks, so you find out for the price of an audit instead of finding out mid-build.
Do we need to hire anyone or replace software to use this?
No. The systems run on your existing accounts, and your team approves anything customer-facing before it goes out. If you want someone watching the machinery, managed operations runs $1,500 to $2,000 per month, month to month, with no long-term contract.
How do we know the automations are actually working?
A bad quote never reaches the customer. Every run is logged and checked against rules written for your business, and the monthly report says in plain English what got done. We hold our own systems to the same standard. Jake publishes his fleet's telemetry live, bad months included.
What happens if we stop using you?
Everything stays yours and keeps working. You own the accounts, the keys, the data, and everything built, and AI usage costs pass through at cost with no markup, so there is nothing to migrate off of and no contract to buy out.
Bring us the workflow that eats your week
Describe it in an email, a quote request you handled this morning or the follow-up list nobody got to, and we will tell you straight whether it is worth automating, no charge for the opinion. If it is, the audit puts the answer in dollars, and the first three clients get it for $1,000.