He Built AI for Restaurants. Car Washes Answered the Phone.

The product was supposed to take dinner orders.

Meddy Ali and his team had built two versions of an AI voice agent designed to answer the phone at restaurants, capture the order and pass it along to the kitchen. The technology worked. Selling it did not.

"It was very hard to sell to restaurants," Ali said. "And then our first customer was a car wash, our second customer was a car wash, and then we signed a huge deal."

That is the moment the story turns — the moment a founder stops selling what he built and starts listening to who is buying it.

"I was like, 'What's going on in the car wash industry?'" Ali said.

What was going on, he found, was a gap. Not a technology gap. A bandwidth gap.

"Car wash operators are great at washing cars," Ali said. "But when it comes to things like customer service and AI and technology, the industry was just very behind a couple of years ago."

Ali pivoted the company into that gap and named it HelloWash. Speaking with host Matt DeWolf in the Arcadian Services booth at The Car Wash Show 2026, he said the platform now works with more than 500 locations after less than two years in the industry, and expects to reach 1,000 this year.

The surprise wasn't the technology. It was the welcome.

Ask most veterans how this industry greets new tech and you will hear some version of slowly. Ali expected the same. He did not get it.

"I think operators, which is a little bit surprising, have really embraced AI," he said. "They wanna do AI in phones, in customer service, in marketing, in finance. They wanna do AI everywhere."

Part of that, he said, has come through the industry's own back channels — operator groups, trade show hallways, one owner telling another. "We have people walk up to us today and they're like, 'Hey, we were just recommended by X, Y and Z,'" Ali said. "It's so awesome to see so many people embracing this brand-new technology that everybody's scared of."

From answering questions to taking action

In the beginning, the job was narrow: catch the calls nobody had time to catch. Hours. Pricing. Where's the location. A membership question that ends with a text message and a link.

The leap since then is the one DeWolf believes will define this era of the technology.

"It was that jump from, 'Oh, I'm gonna ask a bunch of questions,' to, 'Now I can act on your behalf,'" DeWolf said.

In practice, that means an AI agent that can make a retention offer to a member who called to cancel, then write the change directly into the point-of-sale system without a human touching a keyboard. It also means a ticketing layer that pulls calls, emails and web forms into one queue, assigns them to a real person and lets that person manage the membership from inside the ticket.

For one larger customer already standardized on Zendesk, Ali said the answer was not to rip anything out.

"We'll create an AI agent that goes into Zendesk, opens a ticket, reads the data, takes it, goes to the POS system, pulls it, comes back, makes a response and responds to the customer and closes the ticket," he said. "Your agents don't even have to worry about the easy stuff anymore."

Sometimes the customer notices. Ali recalled a caller whose account came up on screen before the conversation had really started.

"We're like, 'Are you this license plate?'" Ali said. "And they're like, 'Oh, you're faster than the LPR cameras.'"

"AI-powered, human-centered"

The phrase is now printed across HelloWash's booth, and Ali credits DeWolf with handing it to him in an earlier conversation. It has also become the line he uses to push back on his own industry's sales pitch.

He said the company recently hired a salesperson away from a competitor — someone trained to tell operators the technology would replace their people and automate 90% of the workload. Once inside the door, Ali said, the new hire admitted the real number had been closer to 60% or 70%.

"That's what we tell people," Ali said. "Hey, don't replace your humans. That's your asset. Especially good humans — just make 'em better."

He is blunt about where that leaves the sales conversation.

"I kind of shoot myself in the foot, in a way, because I'm very honest with what we can and can't do," Ali said. "I won't tell somebody we can automate 90% of your calls. I'll never say it. I tell them the opposite. I said, 'No, we'll do 60, 70, maybe 80% if your stuff is a little bit easier, but 90, I'll never get you to 90.'"

DeWolf framed the technology the same way he would frame any piece of equipment on site.

"It's another tool that we can use, and you need to use it well, and use it responsibly," he said.

The vetting problem nobody warned you about

Here is the uncomfortable flip side of a tool that makes everyone faster: it also makes everyone look established.

DeWolf sees it in marketing content that has started to blur together. "Why does everything sound the same?" he said. "It makes everybody a decent writer — just good enough to kinda pass muster."

Ali sees it on the trade show floor.

"I see so many vendors in the last year that came up and then just left the industry because they couldn't get customers, but they built their website in 30 minutes using AI," he said. "They signed up a bunch of people, and those people were left hanging."

His conclusion is more optimistic than it sounds.

"I think AI is making it so we actually see who the real genuine vendors are," Ali said.

For operators, that raises the bar on the questions worth asking before signing anything: Who actually writes the code? Who owns the underlying technology, and what happens if the platform underneath it changes? How long has this company been solving this industry's problems? What is the churn rate among customers who look like me?

DeWolf put the risk of getting it wrong plainly: "You never know when they're gonna take features that you rely on away, and next thing you know, you're dead in the water."

Where it goes next

Ali expects the next wave to move past the phone and into revenue — AI selling memberships, and win-back campaigns that study why members churned and reach back out to the ones most likely to return. Beyond that, he sees it settling into the operational corners of the business rather than the whole of it.

"I don't think AI will ever run a wash from A to Z, but it'll help in all the little sectors," Ali said. "Customer service is a huge one. If you can solve 70% of customer service issues with AI, you're set."

And that, he argues, is the opening.

"In an industry that really didn't focus on customer service for a long time, now is the time to focus on that," Ali said. "All the smart operators are doing that."

His guardrail is a driving metaphor. Ali said his own team writes roughly 80% of its code with AI, but only because capable engineers are reading every line of it.

"You need a capable driver, but let it drive," he said.

Meddy Ali is the founder and CEO of HelloWash. This story draws on his conversation with host Matt DeWolf on the Better Car Washing Everywhere podcast, recorded at The Car Wash Show 2026.