South African-based vehicle trading platform WeBuyCars has purchased over 2 800 vehicles using artificial intelligence (AI) agents.
This, as the vehicle trading platform positions AI as the cornerstone of its future growth.
According to Wynand Beukes, chief digital officer at WeBuyCars, the platform has got two big AI drivers in WeBuyCars, called blue and orange.
“Orange is the customer-facing large language model, and that’s on our website, also with agentic AI functionality for internal use,” says Beukes.
“Blue is a collection of machine learning models that contains all the propriety information and pricing models of WeBuyCars, where we take a lot of factors into account, like 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.”
WeBuyCars says since late 2022, AI has become a mainstream technology as OpenAI’s ChatGPT rose to global prominence with applications across various industries and sectors of the economy.
It notes that technology continues to advance rapidly, with AI agents generating significant buzz in the industry.
An AI agent is a software system that uses artificial intelligence to act autonomously and proactively on behalf of a user to achieve specific goals.
Unlike simple chatbots or reactive programs, an AI agent can perceive its environment, reason and plan its own course of action, use external tools and APIs, and learn and adapt over time without constant human intervention.
WeBuyCars states the AI agents are already proving their worth.
According to Beukes, blue “has bought just over 2 800 cars autonomously without any human pricing involved. We’re scaling that up as we go.”
He explains that AI agents, also known as agentic AI, are good at breaking down a complex task into smaller steps, deciding on the most efficient way to accomplish them, and even self-correcting its own output, making it a highly-capable and independent tool for automating complex workflows and solving problems.
Beukes points out that the adoption of agentic technology speaks to the digital transformation WeBuyCars has experienced over its 24-year history.
The company says founder brothers Dirk and Faan van der Walt spent years physically moving from one part of South Africa to another, finding vehicles, negotiating prices, finding buyers and selling the vehicles on.
It adds that 17 years into the enterprise, Beukes entered as technology chief, looking to turn essentially manual processes into a fully-fledged enterprise system that could manage all major aspects of the business centrally.
Describing the situation in 2018, he says “everything was managed on a Google sheet” from inventory management to debtors and creditors.
“And they sold over 2 000 vehicles this way a month. The problem was it had reached breaking point. We couldn’t just throw more people at the problem. We knew we had to digitalise this big company.
“One of the first tough decisions that came along was: do we go out and buy a traditional ERP [enterprise resource planning] system so that we can get control of the stock? 2 000 cars is a lot of cars to get control of and it’s difficult to do that on a Google sheet. Or do we build our own software?”
Beukes notes the answer to this question came in the form of a fully-customised system, built from the ground up, that is used to manage all aspects of the business and operations.
Now, WeBuyCars offers a car-buying experience by blending e-commerce with a physical presence. It leverages data and technology to run its 17 “vehicle supermarkets” and just under 100 “buying pods” nationwide.
“When we started, there was nothing. We didn’t have to deal with legacy, which was one of the great things,” says Beukes.
“We wanted to be in control of the software and the second thing is we wanted to be in control of the data.”
When measuring the success of this technology investment, the mindset is simple: “We’re never satisfied.”
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