own consumer sentiment research<\/a> identified the growing role of AI in car shopping, with 35 percent of buyers using the tools – mostly ChatGPT, with Gemini also emerging as influential.<\/p>\nSpeaking to the iTnews Podcast, carsales\u2019 executive general manager of technology and data Michelle Low said that AI offered a way \u201cto rethink entirely how you can solve high friction points\u201d in the purchase experience.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cNext to buying a home, buying a car is probably the highest consideration decision people can make. It’s financial, it\u2019s quite complex, it’s emotional,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
By having a presence inside of ChatGPT, Low said Carsales could \u201ctap into emerging behaviours around how people do research\u201d about potential car purchases.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s important to be where [customers are] at, to offer assistance to the people who might have been on that platform [and are] really starting to think about their next purchase,\u201d Low said.<\/p>\n
\u201cHistorically, someone buying a car might’ve come onto the carsales website but not known where to start searching.<\/p>\n
\u201cBeing on ChatGPT, where someone’s starting a conversation means we can offer them the tooling that makes sense for where they are at in that conversation and help streamline that process a great deal by meeting them where they might be.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat’s the thing with AI: it affords us the means to solve these high friction or complex parts of the [purchase] experience completely differently than what we traditionally might have been used to in building web applications and traditional interfaces alone.\u201d<\/p>\n
On the conversion rates of engagements inside of AI to sales, Low said that the marketplace sees \u201cmuch higher intent in terms of people that have come on [to carsales] from those [AI] interfaces.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe’re also seeing that people, if anything, are better informed as to what they can get out of a trusted transactional marketplace like carsales,\u201d Low said.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, without giving too much away, I will say it’s been positive. It continues to evolve, and we’re pretty excited at what we’re seeing so far.\u201d<\/p>\n
Deriving value from data<\/p>\n
Low initially began her time at carsales leading data, before adding technology responsibility to her remit as well.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy team sits across product, platform, engineering, data AI, core applications, and the enterprise technology function,\u201d Low said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s quite a diverse group. The long and short of it is that my teams and I are responsible for everything the customer sees and interacts with on our platform.\u201d<\/p>\n
The technology and data strategy at carsales \u201cis quite unified,\u201d Low said, with an ultimate goal of optimising \u201cmoments that matter\u201d, which she said made it \u201ceasier and smarter for customers buying and selling vehicles.\u201d<\/p>\n
From a consumer-facing perspective, the moments that matter are measured on impact.<\/p>\n
\u201cUltimately, it is about impact – where a capability \u2026 moves the needle impactfully for the customer,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Carsales also has a significant B2B operation, working with car dealers and manufacturers. Again, the work of Technology and Data is around moments that matter, but there is an emphasis on co-designing appropriate solutions and innovations.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe’ve had really deep relationships with our B2B customers for a long time, so a lot of how we think about product development is about co-thinking, co-designing, soliciting answers from them as to where their problems are,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe find that when we co-design for the pain points, it’s much better strike rate on being able to solve problems meaningfully for them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Low said that carsales had always been data driven.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe genuinely actually build our products with data and treat our data as an asset,\u201d she said.
Under Low, however, there has been a concerted effort to \u201cshorten the distance between where data is produced and where it actually creates value\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cQuite often that\u2019s in two different parts of the business,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe want to close the data-to-value distance pretty much anywhere in the buy-sell experience.\u201d<\/p>\n
This mindset is being brought to bear for B2B customers, with a relatively new dealer insights engine incorporated into the way they work with the carsales platform.<\/p>\n
\u201cA big part of how we assist [dealers and manufacturers] with data has always been about helping them understand things like inventory performance on our site: what vehicles are selling, what do they need to do to optimise sales performance of other vehicles, how can they move slow stock – things like that,\u201d Low said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe call it Insights AI internally, but essentially it\u2019s an insights engine that dealers can access, if they subscribe to it, to ask questions conversationally about current market dynamics with inventory,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Behind the scenes, the focus on shortening the data-to-value gap is being enabled through carsales\u2019 enterprise data platform, and a focus on \u201cthinking about [data] transport and architecture beyond the platform alone.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Carsales\u2019 launch of an app inside of ChatGPT is connecting it to customers who are typically more advanced…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":618924,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":["post-618923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=618923"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618923\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/618924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=618923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=618923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=618923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Carsales](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/1776678975_791_ImageResizer.ashx.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n