Agentic AI Rewrites the Auto Buying Playbook From Lot to Bot

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Although buying a car is often a milestone, it’s rarely a fun experience for the buyer.

The endless weekends spent wandering dealership lots, the cat-and-mouse of price negotiations, and the lurking suspicion that the other side knows far more than you do. The whole process is one of the least trusted retail transactions in the United States.

“Consumers don’t want to get screwed,” CarEdge CEO Zach Shefska told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster. “And it’s not even necessarily about getting the best price; it’s just not wanting to be taken advantage of.”

The U.S. car-buying experience is unlike most other forms of retail. It blends opaque pricing, complex financing and often a deeply adversarial relationship between buyer and seller.

Part of the issue is structural. Unlike real estate, where buyers typically have an agent representing them, car buyers go into negotiations alone. Legacy platforms like Edmunds and TrueCar offer data, but their business models hinge on dealer advertising and lead generation, implicitly aligning them with sellers rather than buyers.

“The customer of those marketplaces is not the consumer; it is the dealership,” Shefska said. “And so, a lot of things are oriented around maximizing profits from the dealership and sacrificing some aspects of the customer experience.”

CarEdge flips that model, he said. Its customer is the consumer, not the dealer. It uses a combination of data, services and artificial intelligence to tip the scales in the buyer’s favor.

CarEdge positions itself as a buyer’s agent for cars. The company offers three layers of support: free content and social media education; software tools and insights that help consumers understand market pricing; and concierge services, where CarEdge negotiates directly on the buyer’s behalf.

The outcome? Informed customers walk into dealerships with confidence.

When Webster asked whether the value lies in saving time or saving money, Shefska said: “I would say we’re not necessarily the fastest, but we’re certainly better and cheaper.”

“We don’t get involved in the actual transaction, and we’re not in a peer-to-peer space,” Shefska said, adding that, unlike some competitors, CarEdge doesn’t handle transactions directly. It connects educated buyers with dealers, streamlining the process.

“We serve the consumer and then hand off to the dealer,” he said.

This symbiosis can be mutually beneficial. Dealers sacrifice some gross profit but gain efficiency, selling to better-informed customers without wasting hours on futile negotiations.

As technology advances, becoming a car buyer’s agent is taking on a whole new meaning. The next phase of CarEdge’s strategy marks the integration of agentic AI. Rather than merely arming buyers with information, Shefska said he wants to deploy AI agents that negotiate directly with dealerships on a consumer’s behalf.

“We see the future of car buying as really AI-supported,” Shefska said. “Why not have your AI agent represent you, save you the time, headache and energy, get the initial pricing, compare that pricing to other dealers… all the while you’re at soccer practice or at work?”

Unlike flashy AI search gimmicks, CarEdge’s negotiator is practical. Consumers select a car they’re interested in and click “negotiate this for me.” CarEdge creates a protected alias email and phone number, and an AI agent initiates negotiations with dealerships. Once pricing is confirmed, the buyer is alerted.

However, delegating negotiation to an algorithm raises obvious questions of trust. How can consumers be sure their AI is really securing the best deal?

CarEdge’s defense lies in its data. With six years of pricing intelligence and millions of data points, the company already underpins its human services with a robust analytics platform. The AI is, in effect, an extension of this capability, programmed to replicate the same comparison shopping and benchmarking that CarEdge has always advised consumers to do manually.

This experiment points toward a broader retail transformation. In categories like real estate and automotive, which are high-value, emotionally charged, and riddled with asymmetries of information, AI agents may become the default intermediaries. Rather than consumers doing their own research and initiating conversations with salespeople, they may soon deploy digital representatives to handle the heavy lifting.

If AI is negotiating for buyers, how do dealers react? Shefska said with openness. Dealers already face their own AI transformation, with companies investing in 24/7 chatbot sales agents to follow up with leads. The key is alignment. If AI lowers acquisition costs while still enabling service, financing and trade-ins, the true profit centers of dealerships, everyone wins.

The rise of generative AI giants poses a threat. Could a company like OpenAI or Google simply offer a “buy a car” button? Webster posed this challenge directly.

“You are asking me the question we talked about at our last board meeting,” Shefska said. “No one has an answer right now… My opinion is that consumers will demand third parties into the future rather than going fully into a walled garden.”

If he’s right, the dealership of the future may not start with a handshake in a showroom, but with two algorithms introducing themselves via email.

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PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster is one of the world’s leading experts in payments innovation and the digital economy, advising multinational companies and sitting on boards of emerging AI, healthtech, and real-time payments firms. She founded PYMNTS.com in 2009, a top media platform covering innovation in payments, commerce, and the digital economy. Webster is also the author of the NEXT newsletter and a co-founder of Market Platform Dynamics, specializing in driving and monetizing innovation across industries. 

CarEdge CEO Zach Shefska says he likes turtleneck sweaters, building products and changing the way people buy cars. 

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