MUMBAI: At Cars24, the bots are not just assisting anymore, they are clocking in for work. Cars24 is pushing deeper into its AI-first playbook after reporting a 50 per cent jump in revenue per employee in H2 FY26, a figure the company directly links to large-scale automation across its business operations. The Gurugram-headquartered automotive marketplace now says AI is no longer a side experiment inside engineering teams, but the operating layer powering everything from inspections and pricing to lending and customer support.
The shift traces back to an internal message sent in April by Vikram Chopra to every function head at the company. The mandate was blunt: revenue, output and metrics per employee across teams had to double through AI automation. According to Cars24, the directive was framed as “non-negotiable”.
The company now claims that decision is translating into measurable financial and operational gains. AI-led efficiencies have reportedly contributed nearly 300 basis points to EBITDA while operating costs remained largely flat even as revenue expanded.
Behind the headline numbers sits a sweeping rebuild of workflows across the organisation. In seller operations and inspections, AI systems are being used to reduce inspection times while improving pricing accuracy, helping lower the rate of inspection misses that directly affect unit economics on vehicle purchases.
Inside refurbishment and retail operations, AI-powered daily audits now monitor the company’s entire retail network through roughly 1,750 automated checkpoints every day. Cars24 also says its AI-driven sales systems orchestrate more than 40,000 personalised customer journeys across the platform.
Customer support has become another major testing ground. Cars24’s AI voice infrastructure now handles more than 1.5 million minutes of calls each month across seven languages and over 20 workflows, built through a partnership with ElevenLabs. The company says dealer dependency and manual interactions have reduced significantly as a result.
The lending and risk business has also been folded into the AI layer. Ten machine learning models are now deployed across underwriting, fraud detection, collections and early warning systems. More than 80,000 documents a month are currently processed for fraud detection workflows alone.
Perhaps the sharpest signal of the company’s changing culture lies inside engineering itself. Cars24 claims engineering output has increased fourfold, with every line of code reviewed by AI and nearly one-third now generated through AI systems. Non-engineering employees have also begun submitting pull requests, reflecting how coding workflows are increasingly spreading beyond traditional developer teams.
The company has built these systems through partnerships with OpenAI, ElevenLabs and Amazon Web Services. Cars24’s consumer app is now available on the ChatGPT Store, allowing users to discover vehicles through conversational AI interfaces.
To reinforce that AI-first identity, Cars24 is now launching Token ’26, a 72-hour individual hackathon scheduled to take place in Delhi from 28 to 30 May. Unlike conventional hackathons filled with teams and pitch decks, Token ’26 is structured as a winner-takes-all contest. Fifty shortlisted engineers will compete individually on live operational challenges drawn directly from Cars24’s business, including AI-driven pricing, inspections, risk modelling and customer decision systems.
The winner walks away with Rs 20 lakh. There is no runner-up prize and no team split.
Participants will receive access to frontier AI models through OpenAI, cloud infrastructure credits from AWS and voice AI capabilities from ElevenLabs, while mentorship will come from Cars24’s AI leadership team and partner experts.
The hackathon’s name itself reflects the company’s broader philosophy. In large language models, tokens are the smallest units of information processed by AI systems. Individually small, but powerful at scale. Cars24 says the idea behind Token ’26 is similar: individual builders, armed with the right tools, can create systems with consequences far bigger than themselves.
As India’s startup ecosystem races to define what an “AI-native” company actually looks like, Cars24 appears determined to move the conversation beyond experimentation. The company’s message is increasingly clear: in the next era of business, AI may not just support operations, it may become the operation itself.