AI agents purchase 2 800 vehicles for WeBuyCars

The vehicle trading platform WeBuyCars, based in South Africa, has significantly embraced technological advancements, acquiring over 2,800 vehicles with the help of AI agents, marking a milestone in their digital transformation journey. According to Wynand Beukes, the Chief Digital Officer, the implementation of AI is envisioned as crucial for the platform’s growth. WeBuyCars uses two main AI drivers named ‘Blue’ and ‘Orange’.

Orange serves the customer-facing roles through the website, offering agentic AI functionality, while Blue comprises a collection of machine learning models that handle proprietary information and pricing strategies using historical data, market trends, and analytics to accurately price vehicles. Since late 2022, the advent of AI and the global rise of platforms like OpenAI’s ChatGPT has emphasized AI’s value in industries, with WeBuyCars taking a leap by integrating this mainstream technology. AI agents autonomously carry out tasks and make independent decisions without continuous human oversight, making them invaluable. Beukes explains that these agentic AI systems are not merely reactive, but capable of perceiving their environment, reasoning, planning, interfacing with external APIs, and adapting autonomously.

Under Beukes’ technological guidance, what started on simple Google sheets as a manual undertaking has transformed into a sophisticated enterprise software system that controls all business operations centrally. WeBuyCars effectively leverages this transformation to integrate both digital e-commerce and physical operations, running 17 large ‘vehicle supermarkets’ and nearly 100 smaller ‘buying pods’ across the nation, ensuring better control over its operations and inventory. The company’s founders, Dirk and Faan van der Walt, initially tackled the business by physically managing every aspect from sourcing to selling vehicles, a process that now benefits from refined efficiency and sophistication through AI integration.