It’s slowly becoming more and more common for cars to be kitted out with increasingly average AI features, but at least the guy selling you your car is free from AI, right? Right? Apparently not, assuming the guy who sold you your car works at WeBuyCars, which recently announced it had integrated not one, but two AI tools into its platform, which it believes to be a “cornerstone of its future growth”.
“We” BuyCars
WeBuyCars has at least dubbed its LLM tools decidedly non-human names like “Orange” and “Blue”, which should avoid potential emotional hardship should the company ever decide to kill off the tools and go back to good ol’ fashioned human labour. But for now, the dealership is revelling in its new cost-saving methods, which were designed to help with the company’s client interactions and even lend a hand with its backend.
“Orange is the customer-facing large language model (LLM), and that’s on our website, also with agentic AI functionality for internal use,” said Wynand Beukes, chief digital officer at WeBuyCars, in a statement.
“Blue is a collection of machine-learning models that contains all the proprietary information and pricing models of WeBuyCars, where we take a lot of factors into account, including our historic data, purchasing and selling history, market analytics, and trends. All those factors we use in pricing models, we update on a weekly basis.”
This isn’t anything new for WeBuyCars. The tools have already been put to use in recent months, with the dealership bragging about its LLM ‘Blue’ purchasing more than 2,800 vehicles “autonomously”, without any form of human intervention involved. “We’re scaling that up as we go,” he continued.
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Fortunately, WeBuyCars isn’t looking to rid itself of a human workforce entirely, and only wishes to augment the team it currently has. That’s assuming the AI doesn’t get any “smarter” than it currently is, in which case WeBuyCars may be forced to reassess the situation and determine its AI tools are doing a better job. But that’s a bridge the company will have to cross if ever it comes to it.
“If we can automate a certain percentage of our lead or buy lead management (where a customer wants to sell a vehicle to us), we can, with the same number of people, handle so many more leads. And then we let the petrolheads — the humans — focus on the fringe cases.”
Beukes argues that there’s no value in sending a human to price a regular VW Polo due to how commonplace it still is on the roads, even today, leaving it instead in the hands of the supposedly competent AI tools. But for special cases, like older models, that’s where WeBuyCars plans to keep humans involved. Whatever happens — you can expect WeBuyCars’ board of directors to stick around for the long run. The others…
