Exclusive: Brilliant Harvest emerges from stealth with AI-powered helpdesk for ag equipment dealers

Brilliant Harvest, an AI-powered helpdesk designed to empower ag equipment dealer teams throughout the customer experience from purchase to repair, has emerged from stealth after signing its first major customer: Rocky Mountain Equipment.

Founded by Remi Schmaltz, an industry veteran who has built and grown two agtech companies—ag retailer DynAgra and farm management software co Decisive Farming—Calgary-based Brilliant Harvest secured $1.3 million in pre-seed funding last fall in a round led by Mark Blackwell at Builders VC alongside AI service provider AltaML Venture Studio.

Under the deal with Rocky Mountain Equipment, the largest ag equipment dealer in Canada, Brilliant Harvest will provide RME’s 43 stores with their own dealer branded mobile app, said Schmaltz, who was inspired to set up the business after seeing the pain points experienced by farmers and ag equipment dealers during the purchasing and support process.

‘Ultimately we’re addressing a talent problem’

In a nutshell, he told AgFunderNews, “Brilliant Harvest is an AI powered customer experience platform for farm equipment and our customers are equipment dealers. We’re starting on the agriculture side with a white label mobile app that is branded for the equipment dealer, but we see a significant opportunity beyond that. Ultimately we’re addressing a talent problem. At peak times such as spring planting, there’s not enough quality support for farmers both on the sales side and the tech support and education side.

“This is really about how do you support the team at the dealership from equipment purchase and research to operational support and repair? How do you provide a superior and scalable customer experience? In order to do that, it’s about capturing expertise.”

He added: “If you have a 40-store dealership with a tech support person or two at every store, for example, how do you share their knowledge? If one person solves a problem how does that get shared to all the other people for whom it might be applicable?”

The white label app, which is available for employees at dealerships and customers to download, facilitates communications both between customer and dealer, but just as importantly, between internal teams at the dealer, he said. The app also ingests manuals (installation, operations, service, repair)—some of which are thousands of pages long—for the equipment sold by the retailer, which the AI assistant can interrogate in seconds to answer customer inquiries, he said.

‘We’re providing answers right away’

Farmers who want to troubleshoot at any hour of the day can get instant answers to detailed questions from a sophisticated AI assistant about equipment based both on information in the manuals and proprietary knowledge within the dealers’ systems based on previous interactions with customers. Through capturing and storing conversations with customers, meanwhile, the AI assistant can interrogate those transcripts and learn from them, he added.

“It’s just a way better experience than flipping through a PDF that’s 1,000 pages long, waiting on hold or texting a support person that is busy with another customer and can’t get back to you for two or three hours. We’re providing answers right away.”

While talking to an experienced human rep is ideal, that person is not available 24:7, and may not actually be able to provide accurate information as quickly as an AI assistant, he noted. “When you’re looking at a new piece of equipment and you have questions about its capacity, for example, these are things frankly, a salesperson doesn’t know off the top of their head.”

This “isn’t about eliminating humans” at equipment dealerships, he stressed. “It’s about enabling them to do more in a less stressful environment, while customers are happier because they’re getting what they need faster.”

‘Millennial and Gen X farmers have different expectations’

When it comes to purchasing and support, many Millennial and Gen X farmers “have really different expectations from Boomers,” added Schmaltz.

“In North America, 41% of farmers are Gen X or Millennials and they don’t necessarily want to sit in a dealer’s office; they want to self-serve online, they want convenience, and they want to be able to communicate through multiple channels.”

‘A turnkey solution’

As this might appear more like a customer relationship management issue than rocket science, why haven’t the large dealers or equipment manufacturers already developed something like this?

According to Schmaltz: “The larger equipment manufacturers and dealers have been talking about doing their own AI projects, but let’s be honest, they’re not software development companies. And most dealers sell lots of brands, so even if a large manufacturer came up with a solution, it’s not going to support other companies’ brands.

“And for the dealers, they want to retain knowledge and strengthen their relationships with farmer customers. If an OEM [equipment manufacturer] is putting its software in between them, that’s taking away from the dealerships’ value proposition.”

Bespoke elements, but underpinning platform is ‘standardized and very scalable’

But how scalable is Brilliant Harvest’s solution if it must be integrated with the in-house systems of each ag equipment dealer it works with?

“For each dealer there’s unique knowledge and business systems and potentially different brands and workflows, so our system is very adaptable,” said Schmaltz. “However, the underpinning platform itself is standardized and very scalable.”

Asked about the business case for dealers, he said: “The challenge they have is that they spend years finding the right talent, hiring and training them, and on average, they leave within a year, and it costs a huge amount of money. When you lose that person, you lose their relationships with the farmers and the knowledge that they have. It’s not uncommon that when you lose an employee, their customers even go with them.

“So when you bring a new person in, how do they get off the ground and running faster? How do you support that team member to meet client needs more quickly?”

A lot of dealerships “don’t have CRMs (customer relationship management systems] or if they do, they’re not used that well,” claimed Schmaltz.

“But to be clear, we’re not a CRM, we’re trying to make things easier for customers but also for employees at dealers trying to figure things out without having to ask 100 questions to fellow coworkers. “Maybe I’ll just ask the [AI-powered] assistant…. And Oh, look, here’s a conversation last year between one of our employees and this is what they figured out as a solution to this exact problem.”

Aside from Rocky Mountain Equipment, Brilliant Harvest is now in discussions with a number of other dealers looking to implement its technology, he said.