a16z PodcastFrom Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI
Carlos García Ottati, CEO of Latin America's largest used car marketplace Kavak, reveals how his company achieved the rare combination of 4x growth while reaching profitability during a brutal market downturn. Rather than deploying traditional AI copilots that employees ignored, Kavak rebuilt around autonomous agents that now handle 95% of customer interactions—a transformation García Ottati compares to Netflix's disruption of Blockbuster.
Key takeaways
- •Build AI system 'brakes' first—establish clear boundaries and controls before deploying autonomous agents at scale.
- •Employees will ignore AI copilots even with perfect information, making autonomous agents a more reliable path than human-assisted tools.
- •Companies can achieve simultaneous growth and profitability during downturns by leveraging AI to fundamentally restructure operations rather than just cut costs.
- •AI adoption follows the same disruption pattern as Netflix vs Blockbuster—incremental improvements lead to complete business model transformation.
- •Unreliable service delivery can force beneficial business model pivots if you're willing to completely reimagine your approach.
Listen to full episode
Best moment
How unreliable contractors taught me to pivot my entire business model
“So I was always under delivering to my users, to my customers.”
most of these kids didn't show up at the time that they needed to mow that lawn. So I was always under delivering to my users, to my customers. And I ended up, like, changing the whole system to becoming sort of like a subscription system where I would tell the owner that their lawn would get covered
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