The AI Explosion M ike Meyer of Meyer Music in Blue Springs, Missouri, and Ryan West of West Music in Coralville, Iowa, be used? Oftentimes, if you’re a business owner, you may not know how people are using these tools in your organization. If you don’t say anything, then you’re just kind of letting everybody do the Wild West and figure it out along the way.”
moderated a roundtable discussion asking attendees how they use AI in the work- place. As an update from a session held at the 2025 convention, the results were anything but a repeat. “What’s changed since last year?” Meyer asked. “Everything, like everything, has changed in AI.” Pulling examples from attendees, West and Meyer dove into a number of examples, but started with a caveat. “A lot of these tools function in a lot of different ways, depending on the role that you have in your organization,” West said. “You also do need to make sure you’re doing it correctly, securely. “If you have an AI policy at your company, or maybe you don’t have an AI policy yet, it’s a really great way to help set the guard rails for your organization of how do we use this? What are the tools that are allowed to be used and what tools aren’t allowed to
Pulling examples supplied by attendees at NASMD, the first one came from Meyer on writing leases. His mother had always negotiated the store leases and when she passed away, that job fell to him. He’d never done it before, so he uploaded the lease and asked AI to help write a five- year lease with a modest increase each year and two, five-year options. In five minutes, ChatGPT gave him an outline, what he needed to look out for and more. “It saved me probably 25 hours worth of time,” Meyer said. One of the keys to effectively working with an AI chatbot is to learn how to write proper prompts. One attendee suggested going to promptcowboy.ai to learn how to become an expert at prompts. Another way West Music has been using
Ryan West (left) and Mike Meyer AI is for training. Sales professionals can listen back to entire sales meetings and ask AI to offer feedback on their performance. “It allows the salesperson to have a lot more ownership in their growth and development,” West said. “And it’s a little less personal than when the manager provides that feedback. Using it as a sales coach is a really great way.” Other ways school music profession- als are using AI today include: candidate screening and strategic hiring, helping to process large data sets, creating common records for the business (like handbooks and knowledge bases), developing code, and developing AI agents and video. MI analyzed, under-priced and under-managed.” Jobe demonstrated how many retailers aren’t properly formatting their profit and loss statements for the repair department as well as not counting maintenance plan charges, rental income and sales, noting that they all work together. “If you take away one thing from this semi- nar, think about all of the extra charges you’re putting on the fence,” Jobe said. “I’m hearing how people are putting $5 on the front of a rental that they’re going to charge when [the parent] returns it for a cleaning fee. Do the math on that — all of your rentals times $5. You’re not giving it back. There are ways to make money on this.” Jobe suggested not to “mess with the gravy” in trying to figure out a portion of rental payments or maintenance that should be attributed to repair. “If I’m going to help an owner find gravy in their business, let’s put the maintenance in with the rental payments and it has noth- ing to do if there is a repair or not,” he said. To overcome the challenge, Jobe sug- gested better traacking, noting that in an informal survey before NASMD, he found that 28% of the respondents don’t track units repaired. MI
The Value of Repair Shops Daniel Jobe
W hen Daniel Jobe, from account- ing firm of Friedman, Kannenberg and Co., speaks about the school music industry, he’s often known to focus on the repair shop. “I think repair is one of the hidden gems of a music store, and I think it’s one of the most overlooked,” Jobe said while speaking to attendees. “Why is it overlooked? Because it’s hard. But it’s the key. What’s it the key to? It’s the key to those school relationships.” Jobe said many school music retailers don’t look at the repair shop as a profit center, but
they should. Jobe surveyed about 100 school music dealers before the show to get a sense of the biggest challenges retailers are facing in their repair shops. Among the answers were finding and retaining good employees, driving profitable growth while servicing key accounts, productivity from existing employees, school budgets and turnaround times. He summed up the challenges noting that repair shops can be “a hidden driver or a hidden drain” for the business. He added that repair departments are often “under-
42 I MUSIC INC. I JUNE 2026
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