AI for Auto Repair Shops — Installed, Tuned and Managed

Photo intake Running today

Point a phone at the dash and at the VIN. Twenty-five seconds later the mileage and VIN are in the work order. No typing, no transposed digits, no walking back out to the car because someone missed a number.

Why it pays Intake is where the errors get created, and every one of them is expensive later — a wrong VIN orders the wrong part and costs a day.

Measured on 11 real intake photos

Shot in a real bay: glare, dirty glass, one photo sideways, one taken from too far away.

Clean reads

8 / 11

no field wrong

Per photo

25 s

on shop hardware

Cost per read

$0

nothing leaves the building

The count matters less than which field failed, so here is the split:

Field	Result	What we do with it
VIN	No wrong answer	Filled in automatically
Odometer	No wrong answer	Filled in automatically
License plate	1 of 3 correct	Never filled in — always shown for you to confirm

Reading a cluster is harder than it sounds, because almost every dash shows the trip meter and the odometer side by side, and on some the trip is the one labelled “miles”. Three of the eleven photos were built as exactly that trap. It took the odometer every time.

The part worth reading twice. On one photo — a VIN shot through glass in the dark — the model could only make out the first few characters, and it filled in the rest itself. It returned WAU5ACFU7MW12227 as if it were certain.

That VIN never reached the work order. Every VIN is checked against its ISO 3779 check digit before anything is filled in, and an invented one passes that by luck about once in eleven tries. The field came back empty with “VIN rejected by checksum” next to it, and the advisor typed seventeen characters.

That is the whole approach. We do not ask you to trust the AI. We check its work with arithmetic that cannot be talked into anything — and where no such check exists, like license plates, the answer goes to a human instead of into your database.

Calls and chat Pilot shops wanted

The phone rings at 7pm on Saturday. Nobody picks up, and that job is at the shop down the road by Monday. It answers, gets the year, make, problem and a callback number, and puts a booking request on Monday's schedule. Same on the shop's website, where most of the questions are hours, price range and “do you work on my car”.

It says plainly that it is not a person. It hands off anything it cannot handle instead of improvising, and it never quotes a repair price — that is a conversation for someone who has seen the car.

Why it pays A missed call is not a lost call. It is a lost repair order, and you never find out it happened.

Bringing work back Pilot shops wanted

Every shop has a list of work a customer said no to. Rear brakes at 3 mm in May. A leaking strut in March. It sits in the system and nobody has time to go back through it. Same with the customers who simply stopped coming.

It walks that history, drops what has since been done elsewhere or no longer applies, and writes each person a short message about their own car. Not a blast — a blast is how a shop's number gets marked as spam.

Why it pays This is the cheapest money in the building. The car is already diagnosed, the customer already knows the shop, and the labor was already sold once. Nothing else on this page has a shorter path to a booked hour.

It drafts review replies too, in the shop's own voice, and flags the ones an owner should answer personally rather than send.

Where the rules bite. In the United States, a reminder about work already found on a customer's own car is service messaging, and a promotion is not — they are registered separately with the carriers and a shop that mixes them can lose the number entirely. We keep those apart, and we will tell you which side a given message falls on before it goes out.

Write-ups the customer can act on Pilot shops wanted

“RR brakes 3mm, rotors scored, caliper slide seized” is exactly what a technician should write and exactly what no customer will approve. It becomes two sentences with the reason it matters and what happens if it waits — attached to the technician's photos, not instead of them.

Why it pays Customers approve what they understand. This is the difference between a declined line and a sold one, and it costs the technician nothing — they keep writing the way they always have.

The original note stays on the work order. The rewrite is what the customer sees, and the advisor can edit it before it goes out.

Translation, both directions Pilot shops wanted

For your customers. Estimates, inspection findings and texts in the language the customer actually reads. A customer who half-understands an estimate does not approve it, and nobody wants to be the person asking their kid to translate a brake job over the phone.

For your technicians. The same write-up in the language your tech is fastest in. A good technician slowed down by paperwork in a second language is an expensive way to lose hours.

For European cars. Factory procedures, bulletins and wiring notes come out of Germany in German, and the English that eventually appears is late, partial, or quietly wrong. We translate the source, keeping part numbers, torque figures and terminal designations exactly as printed — those are not words to be paraphrased.

Why it pays On a European car the factory document is the difference between diagnosing the fault and replacing parts until it stops. Reading it in German should not be the reason you cannot.

Parts invoices against the work order Pilot shops wanted

Photograph or forward the supplier invoice. It reads the lines, matches them to the repair order they belong to, and shows what does not line up — a part billed that was never fitted, a core charge that came back twice, a price that is not the price you were quoted.

Why it pays Parts errors are small, frequent and almost never caught, because checking every invoice line against every RO is nobody's favourite hour. It is the kind of leak you only see once something counts it for you.

Reading invoices is the same capability as reading a dash, and it has been tested on real supplier paperwork. What is still in pilot is the matching against your repair orders, which depends on how your system stores them.

How it actually goes

We look first. A day in your shop, or a call and access to your numbers. We come back with where the money is leaking, in order of size. Sometimes the answer is that AI is not your problem, and we will say so.
One thing gets installed. Not six. The one with the shortest path to money, tuned on your jobs, your cars and the way your advisors talk.
We stay responsible for it. Models drift, suppliers change their paperwork, a phone tree gets rearranged. That is our problem, not another thing on your desk.
It earns the next one. If the first piece does not pay for itself in a way you can see on a report, there is no reason to add a second.

Why it runs in your shop and not in a cloud

Your customer list stays yours. Names, numbers, plates and VINs never leave the building — there is no third party to trust, because there is no third party.
No bill per question. The hardware is bought once. Whether you run it forty times a day or four hundred, the cost is the same.
It works when the internet doesn't. Intake keeps running through an outage, which is more than the shop's card reader can say.

We put AI in your shop and keep it running