If you want to see the future of AI, forget the server farms of Northern Virginia or the startup incubators of San Francisco. Go to a car wash company just outside Fort Lauderdale.
The intelligence running the operation comes from a company you may not have heard of, unless you are in the car wash business, where they are an industry leader—Sonny’s The CarWash Factory. Sonny’s is the world’s largest manufacturer of conveyorized car wash equipment—a business traditionally defined by brushes, soap and belts, not code. Yet across thousands of locations, they are replacing decades-old sonar with computer vision to size vehicles in milliseconds, using license-plate recognition for instant loyalty enrollment and testing conversational AI at the drive-up kiosk.