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Jay Ku says the next wave of AI in automotive won’t win by automating people out—it’ll win by making average teams deliver a top-tier human experience every single time.

Jay’s path into automotive is the kind you don’t storyboard—he left home at 14, found cycling in New Hampshire, rode a bike across America at 17, turned pro while at Harvard, and eventually landed in auto through OEM work and his time leading at TrueCar. But the throughline isn’t prestige or titles—it’s obsession with human interaction: what people feel, what they carry into a dealership, and why trust is so hard to earn in a business that lives and dies on it.

In this conversation, Jay breaks down the two pain points he thinks quietly poison dealership growth: massive sales turnover and how anonymous digital leads feel the moment they hit a CRM. Then he shares what he’s building at Hey Greenlight—a pair of products designed to add context and confidence at the exact moment reps need it: Signal, which enriches leads with key insights, and Wingman, a real-time AI teleprompter built to help reps say the right thing (without stealing the human moment). The takeaway is simple—and spicy: AI isn’t the closer. The person is. The tech just helps them show up like a pro.

Timestamped Takeaways

0:00 — The unexpected confession that sets the tone

1:09 — “He gets it.” Why Jay Ku stands out in automotive

3:37 — The two dealership problems nobody has truly fixed

5:31 — Leaving home at 14: how adversity shaped his edge

7:23 — Riding across America at 17 changed how he reads people

9:26 — Why car dealerships are pillars of every community

12:01 — Cars aren’t transactions—they’re upward mobility

14:13 — Customers arrive armored. Here’s why trust is so hard

16:11 — AI skipped the human—and that’s the real mistake

20:36 — Signal + Wingman: AI built to support, not replace

24:06 — The confidence gap killing sales conversations

29:06 — The follow-up text that quietly loses the deal

31:23 — How AI can scale empathy without feeling fake

34:44 — The hidden cost of burning leads and turnover

35:16 — Why the future of dealerships is more human, not less

Connect with Jay Ku at https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayku/

Learn more about Hey Greenlight at https://www.heygreenlight.com/

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