Product teardown · essence only

It listens to the call and collapses five screens into one.

A real-time assistant for salespeople on live calls. It transcribes as they talk, recognizes what's being discussed, pulls the matching inventory and policy, and puts the answer on screen at the moment it's needed. The agent stops searching and goes back to talking.

62K+Calls processed per day
22.5KAgents and admins on it
75+Dealer organizations live
3Platforms: web, tablet, phone
01The load it removes

The job was never selling. It was tab-switching.

What an agent held open before, and what replaced it.

Before — five-plus lookups, mid-sentence
After — one surface, updating itself
5+Apps open at once to answer a basic question
25–90Calls a day, none of them memorable
20–60Store policies to recall on cue
02The mechanism

Six steps, all inside the length of one call

Nothing here waits for the conversation to end — except the last step.

01

Listen

Audio streams in as the call happens.

02

Transcribe

Speech becomes live, readable text.

03

Recognize

Vehicles, intents and objections get named.

04

Retrieve

Matching stock and policy are fetched.

05

Surface

The one relevant answer appears on cue.

06

Summarize

Hang-up writes the notes and follow-ups.

Step five is the whole product. Retrieval is commodity; choosing the single thing worth showing at second forty-three of a live conversation is not.

03The layout that worked

Two panels hold still so one can move

The arrangement arrived at after two rejected alternatives.

Anchored

Transcript

  • Scrollable, referenceable record
  • Somewhere to look back to
Moves

Live assistant

  • One suggestion at a time
  • Policy reminders on cue
  • Action items captured as they land
Anchored

Customer record

  • Persistent through the whole call
  • Prior visits, preferences, payment

Fixed sides, live centre — the reason the screen stays legible at conversation speed.

04What the failed versions taught

Every rejected prototype produced a rule

Two explorations were built and killed. Four rules survived them.

What was tried Why it broke The rule it produced
A chatbot — one clean answer, nothing else The feed moved at talking speed with nothing to anchor to Fast is not usable. Give the eye a fixed point.
Dropping the customer profile to save room The agent had to hold the context in their head instead Never make the human the memory.
Vehicle options as rich cards Ate the screen and fell apart past a handful of trims Dense and scannable beats pretty and paginated.
Trusting the model's output as final A wrong read mid-call had no escape hatch If it can be wrong, it must be correctable — live.
05Four surfaces

One engine, four places it shows up

Each surface exists because a different moment demanded it.

Desktop

The live copilot

The three-panel call screen. Inventory, policy and action items assemble themselves while the agent talks.

Auto-summary at hang-up
Dashboard

Alerts, routed by role

Voicemails, unhappy customers, same-day appointments. Managers choose which alerts reach which agent.

75+ types · 1-hour callback window
Phone

Showroom capture

The same listening, untethered. Open, find or create the customer, record the in-person conversation.

Hands the summary to finance
Internal

Policy authoring

Each organization runs a different playbook, so policies are configurable: trigger, wording, scope, on or off.

Per-organization rules
06The non-obvious part

The hard problem was consent, not accuracy

Recording competitive, autonomous salespeople for the first time.

Coaching, not surveillance

Managers get review screens framed as helping the agent win, not catching them out.

Framing decides adoption

Pay the agent first

Solve today's annoyance before asking for tomorrow's data. Value has to land before trust is requested.

Utility precedes buy-in

Precision over volume

The right sentence at the right second, not a dashboard of everything that might apply.

One answer beats ten
Strip it all back and the product is one bet: an agent who never has to look something up will out-sell an agent who does. Everything else is plumbing.
Provenance

Distilled from a single public product-design case study published in 2026, covering roughly eight months of work on a vertical AI assistant for automotive retail. Product and company names are omitted by request. Figures — call volume, seat count, organization count, alert types, and the workload ranges — are the case study's own; the pipeline, the rules table, and the three principles are my compression of its narrative, not labels it uses.