Three Southern California collision veterans are developing AI software in-house to enhance common body shop activities. Franchised collision centers in Hesperia and Baldwin Park owned by one of the partners are beta-testing introductory elements, with broader application rolling out later this year.
“It’s an ‘evolving brain’ for collision repair,” Ali Jakvani told Autobody News, “starting with ADAS and estimating, and growing into operations.” That plan ideally includes hiring and workflow — from possible missed repairs to better billing — as well as financial strategy, like revenue forecasting, among other areas.
Jakvani co-owns Crash Co. with Amir Siddiqui and Ruben Jandres. The franchised shops aboard so far with the product are two ProColor Collision locations Jandres owns. Crash Co., a separate beast from Fix Network’s ProColor brand, wants to be working with a dozen collision centers over the next 18 months, Siddiqui said.
Crash Co. partners are a deep bench of years in SoCal body shops of all stripes: Jakvani and Siddiqui lead operations efforts, with Siddiqui crunching numbers and Jakvani adding that tech acumen. Jandres heads and handles marketing and insurance. Jakvani’s dad, long-time body man Ashraf "AJ" Jakvani, is also part of the team, advising the trio.
“I live in my father’s shadow in the industry and I’ll always seek his guidance,’ Jakvani emailed after an interview. “I wanna take the torch from him now and I include him in everything. I mean, his experience is unmatched.”
Counter-Terrorism Work and ‘All Together Now’
The partners’ product is CrashCodex, an AI-based supplement to operations software. Developmental materials call it a “professional-grade administrative suite” of products. The “administrative” appears to be a key element.
“Codex won’t replace the shop management system; it will be the intelligence layer on top of it,” according to Jakvani. “Think of it as the ‘brain’ sitting above the required vendor, orchestrating and automating the flow of data, tasks and decisions across the shop.”
Screenshot of a CrashCodex dashboard.
The partners’ aim is for a shop’s experience — and from there a customer’s — to “feel like a single platform.”
Ali Jakvani’s tech background dates to questions and some answers following the 9/11 attacks 24 years ago.
Governmental agencies and others were working on how the attacks could happen and Jakvani was connected to contract consulting work with the Los Angeles Mayor’s office, U.S. Department of Justice and FBI and the newly formed Department of Homeland Security. He saw what poor work integration, cited after as a preventable problem, existing prior to the attacks, can do or produce. Or not.
“The through-line in all that was the same challenge we’re talking about here; it was a huge problem,” wrote Jakvani, who also studied the issues in a master’s program at University of Southern California. If entire law enforcement efforts suffered from it, “you can imagine how much harder it hits an under-resourced shop.”
One Possible Solution: Vendor-Agnostic Cooperation
“If all systems worked together,” Jakvani continued, “we would have less problems all around.”
He noted a common issue today for operators, multiple software products, and listed nine without a breath — management products, estimatics, databases and related sources, parts websites “all on platforms that don’t talk to each other. For years this fragmentation has blocked real innovation.”
Jakvani said CrashCodex works with whatever vendors a shop prefers and they don’t necessarily have to alter current practice — just get them to play well with others. Programming began in earnest early this year.
The medium here is also the message: software development — and indeed, how the partners run Crash Co. — draws from “day-to-day duties vs. top-down management and controls.”
Shops need “a set of tools that work in sync, so I get accurate insights for my business without wasting hours reconciling systems.” CrashCodex is “the glue [an] intelligence layer that connects these systems.”
Jakvani said the aim is “software that works together and gets tasks done now, with less gatekeeping.” Shop staff — “owner, production manager, estimator, accountant” — get literally on the same page if only a virtual one. Crash Co. is the second MSO of late to debut an in-house developed AI effort, after Better Collision Centers, on the opposite coast in the U.S. Southeast.
“When Codex reaches its full vision,” Jakvani wrote, “it will unify financials, shop management, compliance, and customer workflows into one connected system.” This means reduced risk to DRP scores from, say, rental times, and “estimators won’t have to juggle half a dozen disconnected apps just to do their jobs.”
He told Autobody News, “at the very least it frees up staff and streamlines operations.”
Paul Hughes