Good morning!
Here are today’s highlights:
Shoppers can now create a shopping cart in Google search or in YouTube as they browse for products—without going to a merchant’s website.
Gene Marks says the fundamentals of SEO haven’t really changed.
In New York City, hotel housekeepers will make six figures as unions reassert their strength.
At an industry trade show, the future of restaurants was on display.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Here’s how a local carwash is using AI to upgrade its operations: “They started with maintenance, which is crucial to operations in the car-wash world. Each bay involves upwards of 20 different pieces of equipment that work together, and if there’s an issue with any single part, the whole thing goes down. ‘The worst thing that can happen is someone shows up and the car wash is down for maintenance,’ [co-founder Erin] Dreeszen told Fortune. And now, with 26 locations and 150 car-wash bays across them, that’s a lot of potential for something to go wrong—as well as a lot of repeatable problems begging for a more streamlined approach.”
“Working with MaintainX, Autowash adopted an AI-powered maintenance system that ended up laying the groundwork for the company to reimagine its entire operations layer around data and AI. The results are tangible: Repair times dropped 74 percent across locations, and labor productivity jumped as AI enabled workers to better do their jobs. Institutional knowledge that was previously stuck in employees’ heads is now systematized and searchable.”
“Each day, Autowash maintenance technicians have to inspect every piece of equipment, which they used to do with an old-fashioned clipboard, pen, and paper checklist. Now it’s a procedure in the operations software system. When a technician flags an issue, the system automatically starts creating a maintenance ticket.”
“The company’s mobile maintenance technicians who service the different locations were used to doing things a certain way, and they took pride in holding the required knowledge. It wasn’t until MaintainX introduced an AI-powered copilot feature that automatically starts guiding technicians on the right steps to take, using information from the equipment user guides and the company’s own repair procedures, that they really started seeing the value in it.” READ MORE
