Tech talk, with Ashby Lumber
With locations on opposite sides of the San Francisco Bay in Berkeley and Concord, California, Ashby Lumber operates in the shadows of tech industry royalty. Brian Rocha, vice president of sales and marketing for the prodealer, says he can’t directly trace Ashby’s embrace of technology to the local business culture. But it certainly doesn’t hurt.
[The following is excerpted from HBSDealer’s June Technology Issue, coming to mailboxes soon.]
Rocha spoke with HBSDealer on a number of tech-related topics:
On the potential of artificial intelligence: ChatGPT is the most popular AI out there, and they’ve improved their program a ton. Last year when you first started using it, it was able to help write emails and marketing copy and things like that, but it wasn’t giving you current information. Now they’ve updated the plugins. Now you have web search features. You have more data-analysis features, and that’s really what I think has made that more useful to us.
We’ve built a bot inside of ChatGPT that’s geared towards building materials search—It’s a search engine for building materials essentially. So our salespeople ideally could use this when they’re engaging with the customer. If they get a question they’re not able to answer, they can punch it into our bot. And then our bot can scrape the internet for information that would be useful to our salesperson in helping a customer.
Technology and the brain drain: In this industry right now, we’re seeing a lot of experience that has been built up over the years leave the field. And the next generation isn’t quite filling that space as effectively.
The result is a gap in information and knowledge that’s just not transitioning over to the next generation. So we’re forced to use technology to get that next generation up to speed. And that’s where I feel artificial intelligence is a good tool.
It’s still so new. I believe there's going to be an opportunity for us to really invest in it, and I feel like that’s going to come in the customer-engagement end, but I’m just not quite there yet. I haven’t found the right company or software yet that’s going to be able to provide what we want—a seamless conversation with the customer, just like a person.