Bill Playford has built his career at the intersection of automotive retail strategy and technological innovation. For over two decades, his journey has encompassed the full spectrum of automotive retail evolution—from developing early digital retailing methodologies, to building predictive analytics platforms, to training dealerships to get the most out of their people and technology.

Throughout his career, Bill hasn't just adapted to industry transformation—he's helped invent it.

From Factory Roots to Industry Leadership

Bill is a fourth-generation auto worker who went from spending his summers assembling harmonic balancers for an automotive supplier to calculating the rates of return for investments at a venture capital firm in just a short few years. Building on his undergraduate work in quantitative social science, master's studies in e-commerce and entrepreneurship, along with a lifelong passion for automobiles, he set his sights on what we refer to today as automotive digital retail.

As the industry was just beginning to grasp the potential of online sales, Bill was already building the systems and methodologies that would define automotive e-commerce for years to come. At one of the industry's pioneering digital dealerships, Bill immersed himself in the complexities of operations, franchise law, and emerging online sales channels. Over four years, he created an independent network of dealerships to support customer demands, designed the nation's first operational affinity selling program, pioneered modern lead scoring, all while selling vehicles remotely to more than a dozen states. Bill's extensive demographic and psychographic targeting developments earned him an appointment to Kelley Blue Book's inaugural dealership council. More importantly, Bill discovered his true passion: creating tools that simultaneously improved customer experience and team performance—a dual focus that would define his career.

Global Innovation & Enterprise Solutions

Bill was recruited by the famed business incubation and technology company, Trilogy, to join a small team that would go on to build the blueprint for AutoNation's online purchasing program. During this time of rapid change, Bill and his team developed many new processes, including everything from embedded video testimonials to designing a proprietary CRM to handle all of it. In just over a year, two pilot programs successfully demonstrated that the cost of selling a vehicle could be reduced by nearly 70%. The program was so successful that it was relaunched in India, leading to the first direct OEM-to-consumer sale.

Bill then went on to help form SmartLeads, the industry's first OEM-adopted lead scoring platform. Working alongside a global team of machine learning and neural network engineers, Bill transitioned from predictive analytics to pioneering big data applications in automotive retail. While assisting in the design and launch of SmartLeads, Bill led the initial growth of the program, adding over 600 dealerships to the pilot program while also working closely with the industry's largest lead aggregators, including AutoByTel, AutoUSA, Dealix, and Hachette Filipacchi/JumpStart. At the conclusion of his time at Trilogy, he oversaw third-party lead acquisition for two of the nation's five largest auto groups, guided the scoring of over nine million third-party leads, tested thousands of variables, and handed over the baton to the team that would manage OEM lead acquisitions for Hyundai North America. It was during this time, Bill came to the realization that the success of automotive technology was not predicated on just innovation, but on the people who used that technology inside the dealership.

Transforming Dealership Performance

Understanding the evolution of automotive sales was going to take a holistic approach, Bill pivoted to a role that would allow him to address both technological and human elements of dealership success. Since 2011, Bill has served as Vice President and Partner at DealerKnows Consulting. Throughout that time, he has directly worked with dealerships in 35 states and provinces, covering nearly 250 towns and cities throughout North America, and almost every available automotive brand. His work has extended internationally, helping to serve American military personnel and their families through his commitments with Military Auto Source. To ensure his clients received a return on their training investment, Bill leveraged his extensive background in SaaS, leading the development of the industry's first dedicated accountability technology. The TaskTeacher platform has analyzed nearly six million data points, grading the performance of both internet lead and phone handling, as well as managerial response.

Bill's deep understanding of the online landscape and consumer behavior has provided many opportunities to collaborate with many prestigious automotive companies. To date, he has created workflows inside 36 different CRM solutions and has worked closely to refine and develop systems for Dominion Dealer Solutions, DealerPeak, OpLogic, and multiple projects with Cox and VinSolutions. Bill's insights have extended far beyond just CRMs, having worked with the likes of BMW, Rolls-Royce, Stellantis, Lexus, Southeast Toyota, Experian, Silvercar, and several startup companies. One of Bill's proudest moments was working with Google to create an automotive advertising council and overseeing its very first meeting. A sought-after industry speaker, Bill shares his expertise at major automotive conferences and events nationwide, highlighted by hosting the DealerKnows Summer Camp in 2023 and 2024.

AI Leadership at Auto Agentic

With Auto Agentic, Bill now blends his life's work of creating innovative technologies and helping people become the best versions of themselves. As Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer of Auto Agentic, Bill focuses on the next frontier of automotive retail intelligence, such as AI-driven forecasting and planning technologies, systems that analyze customer behavior patterns to optimize inventory allocation, and bridging traditionally separate planning processes with actionable AI insights. He sees the future of automotive retail not as a battle between human and machine intelligence, but as a powerful partnership where AI handles the complexities, allowing humans to do what they do best by focusing their energies on relationship building, being creative, and strategic decision making.

Drawing on his unique experience spanning manufacturing, retail sales, enterprise technology, and data science, Bill is uniquely positioned to guide Auto Agentic's development of AI solutions that truly understand the intricacies of dealership operations—and the human elements that make them successful.