Inside Tractor Zoom With Hank Mandsager

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Hank Mandsager has spent three and a half years watching the AI conversation move from data-science jargon to a top-of-mind business question for every equipment dealer. In this Inside Tractor Zoom episode, he cuts through the hype to explain what AI actually is, where dealerships realistically stand today, and what to do — or not do — if you're wondering whether you're falling behind.

What We Covered

• What AI, LLMs, and agents actually are — and why the underlying technology has been around a lot longer than the headlines suggest
• The three-phase journey every organization has to walk before it can truly leverage AI: digital transformation, analytics, and finally AI itself
• Where dealerships stand right now, and the mindset shift Hank has seen in his time at Tractor Zoom
• Real examples of AI already delivering measurable value — from price prediction to inventory risk rating to sales intelligence (see Tractor Zoom’s approach to AI and how we already use AI in equipment dealer tools)
• The risk of staying on the sidelines, and the small practical steps dealers can take to get started

Learn more about how the Anvil Pro Sales Intelligence feature and its AI Assistant can improve visibility into your dealership's sales processes. Available now for all John Deere dealers on Anvil Pro.

Key insights for dealers

The bottleneck isn't the technology. It's the culture.
Hank is direct: the technology will keep improving whether you're ready or not. The dealerships that will pull ahead are the ones who've done the work of building a learning-oriented culture — one where people experiment, share what worked, and admit what didn't. That change takes time, and there's no shortcut.

AI won't fix bad data. It will accelerate the problems bad data creates.
Adopting AI without first cleaning up business processes and analytics discipline doesn't just fail to work — it makes things worse, faster. If your data is messy or siloed, an agent operating on top of it will multiply the confusion at machine speed. The foundation matters more than the ceiling.

Tractor Zoom has been using AI for years. You've probably already benefited from it.
Price prediction, smart descriptions, inventory risk rating — these have been quietly powered by machine learning inside Tractor Zoom Pro since before "AI" became the household term. The newest addition, Sales Intelligence in Anvil Pro, brings that same approach to a dealer's sales pipeline: one source of truth, with an assistant that can answer the follow-up questions dashboards can't.

Insight is only valuable if it's close to action.
Reports that arrive in your inbox once a quarter and require synthesis before you can do anything with them almost never turn into action. The real power of AI, in Hank's view, is embedding insight directly into the workflow where the decision gets made — on the phone, in the CRM, on the lot.

The best way to start is small — and to make it a team sport.
Give people access to enterprise-approved AI tools. Encourage them to try things. Share what worked and what didn't. The organizations that treat AI adoption as a learning exercise, not a technology rollout, are the ones building the muscle they'll need when the pace of change catches up.

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About Hank

Hank Mandsager is the Manager of Data & Analytics at Tractor Zoom, where he leads the team responsible for the machine learning and AI models built into Tractor Zoom Pro and Anvil Pro. He joined Tractor Zoom three and a half years ago as Lead Data Scientist — a title, he'll be quick to note, that has evolved as the field has. Outside of work, Hank is a new dad to twin sons, which has given him a fresh perspective on what the next generation's relationship with AI might look like.