Built by automotive technology veterans.

Barry Hillier

Barry has spent more than twenty-five years working at the intersection of brand, technology, and entrepreneurship. He has co-founded eight companies, including GloveboxCMS, Bumper, and RevUps, three SaaS platforms built specifically for automotive dealer networks. Earlier in his career he led award-winning brand work at Saatchi & Saatchi, BBDO, and Operex, including the Hellmann's Real Food Movement that won Cassies Grand Prix (Canada's highest marketing-effectiveness award) and the AXE Body Spray campaign that took Yahoo's Idea of the Festival in Venice. His work has earned more than fifty international awards across packaged goods, financial services, technology, and automotive.

At Auto Agentic, Barry sets the strategic direction and is the executive line for every customer relationship. He is the Director of the Toronto chapter of the AI Fellowship, is a member of the Artificial Intelligence Safety Foundation, and is the founder voice of the Auto Intelligence Podcast where he explores how the industry will operate in the AI era. On a customer engagement, he runs the Day-90 executive review with the inbound contact personally and is the call you make when something needs an executive answer.

Bill Playford

Bill is a fourth-generation auto worker whose twenty-year career has been spent inside the dealership rather than around it. He has worked directly with more than 1,200 dealerships across 35 states and provinces, helping operators navigate the operational realities of modern retail. He pioneered the lead scoring and digital retailing methodologies that became standard practice across the industry, and was recruited by Trilogy onto the global team of machine-learning and neural-net engineers that built SmartLeads, the industry's first OEM-adopted ML lead-scoring platform. By the time the program transitioned to Hyundai North America's internal team, SmartLeads had scored over nine million leads.

At Auto Agentic, Bill is the operator's operator. On a customer engagement, he runs the weekly check-in with the rooftop GM and validates anything in the workflow that touches the floor, the BDC, or the service drive. He has been a VP and partner at DealerKnows Consulting since 2011, sat on Kelley Blue Book's inaugural dealership council, helped Google form the automotive advertising council, and built the TaskTeacher accountability platform, which has analyzed roughly six million data points on dealership team performance.

Karla Congson

Karla has spent twenty-five years at the front edge of digital transformation, AI systems design, and enterprise strategy. She is the CEO and CTO of Agentiiv, where her team has built more than one hundred specialized AI agents currently running in production for enterprise clients, saving an average of five hours per employee per week. Agentiiv was selected for the Vector Institute FastLane Program, Geoffrey Hinton's AI accelerator and one of the most prestigious in Canada. Karla is a 2025 Finalist in the Women in AI Awards North America (Startup Entrepreneur) and was nominated for CEO Magazine's Top 50 Women Over 50 Global list the same year.

At Auto Agentic, Karla leads AI governance. Human-in-the-loop is her design principle, not a feature. On a customer engagement, she reviews any agent output flagged for accuracy or oversight concerns, and she is the founder responsible for making sure the AI deployment never becomes a liability event. She brought Singularity University to Canada through its first national conference in 2017 and regularly leads masterclasses for the Canadian Marketing Association on AI in business.

Mike Carrick

Mike has spent more than twenty years architecting the kind of systems that financial institutions trust with millions of customer accounts. He has built secure, scalable digital platforms for Fortune 500 companies, banks, and asset managers, holding senior roles as Chief Experience Officer at XDS and Head of User Experience at RBC Wealth Management, RBC Global Asset Management, and PH&N Investment Services. In each of those positions he set new standards for combining enterprise-grade security with user experience that does not get in the way of the work.

At Auto Agentic, Mike is the architecture custodian. He is the co-founder of Agentiiv, the enterprise AI architecture Auto Agentic is built on, and he leads the technical team building the platform. On a customer engagement, he owns the data layer. He configures the connections to the systems your operation already runs (DriveCentric, Mia, CarWars, Dealertrack and the rest of the stack) and designs the normalization that gives the rooftop a single operational view across departments. When your IT or security team raises a question, Mike is the founder who answers it.