From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI
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How did Carlos García Ottati define the “brakes” needed before building AI at Kavak?
When you're building AI, the first thing that you need to build is the brakes of the system. It's the understanding on where you're gonna deploy it and how you're gonna deploy it. We had thousands and millions of information lines about our users. And the first thing that we did was we just built the system that allowed us to understand. everything about every user. We built these co-pilot tools and we realized very quickly they didn't adopt them. So we went funnel by funnel putting agents in front of like critical aspects of the business. We put the agents in front of our users really quickly. It it was very painful. If you see the best companies out there, ninety seven percent of their value gets created after year fifteen.
To your one five. Ninety seven percent of their value.
Forty percent of used car transactions in Latin America end in fraud. Not the lemon problem you find in the United States. Kidnappings, forged documents, stolen vehicles. And in Mexico, only five percent of the used car market is financed, compared to ninety percent in the US. Carlos Garcia Otati founded Kavak after being defrauded twice trying to buy and sell cars in the region. The company he built handles everything buying, reconditioning, selling, financing, warranties, and logistics. Four separate businesses underneath one consumer experience, operating across Latin America and the Middle East. By 2021, Kavak had 10,000 employees and was growing at 300%. Then capital disappeared and the company had to rethink everything.
Instead of retreating. Carlos Bet on AI. replacing co-pilot tools that employees wouldn't adopt with agents that now handle more than 90% of customer interactions. The transition took a full year of flat growth. A16Z's Angela Strange and Gabriel Vasquez speak with Carlos Garcia Otati, founder and CEO of Kavak.
Carlos, for those who aren't familiar with Cavat, can you introduce the company and tell us a little bit about the scale of where you're at?
Yeah, sure. Well, first of all, thanks for having me here. It's amazing. Cabac is an all-in-one marketplace to do anything related to your car. So we work out of Latin America. We work in Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Argentina. We also have operations in the Middle East. And what we essentially do is we manage the lifetime of our users from the moment that they want to sell their car to the moment that they want to buy a car. If their car breaks down, we're there as well. So we manage the end-to-end process of a user's journey while they own their car. And we do everything. We buy these cars, we recondition them, we then sell them online. We provide the financing to our users as well. We manage their warranties or services throughout the process.
We pay their tickets for them if they want us to do that. And we just make sure that we're just building that relationship with our user as they go along. In terms of scale, well the business is probably the biggest e commerce auto business in Latin America. We do around ten thousand transactions every month, growing very fast. We have around thirty five hundred people. Yeah. Fantastic. I
wish I had a service that would also pay my parking tickets. Yeah. Well, Carlos, when we first met, like there was this particular intensity that you brought to the table immediately. And I think we'll see that across the interview. But I think there's something unique about your background, having been born in Caracas, Venezuela, moving a lot. I think you did fourteen schools. Is that right? Then and we're just curious how that early upbringing kind of shaped Carlos now.
Wow. It's a good question. Let me try to unpack that, right? There's like a lot of the learnings and a lot of what I am today come from those years and mm-hmm from my family. So yeah, you know, I lived in up until I was like 17, 18, I've lived in Venezuela, in the US, moved a lot. And I think three things sort of like came out of that that still stay with me. The first thing is getting used to change, right? And changing 14 different schools meant that sometimes in the same city I would go to a different school.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
How did Carlos García Ottati define the “brakes” needed before building AI at Kavak?
0:00–7:02
2
What early personal experiences shaped Carlos’s approach to solving complex problems?
7:02–15:06
3
Why does Kavak operate four separate businesses under one consumer experience?
15:06–22:07
4
How did Kavak transition from co‑pilot tools to AI agents that handle 90‑95% of customer interactions?
22:07–31:06
5
What criteria did Kavak use to choose its first expansion markets like Mexico City, São Paulo, and Buenos Aires?
31:06–38:01
6
How did the company manage a year of flat growth while restructuring for AI at scale?
38:01–45:31
7
What advice does Carlos give to founders building businesses in emerging markets?
45:31–52:40
8
How does Carlos continuously reinvent his role as CEO to keep Kavak growing?
52:40–59:39
Speakers
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