Autotrader's team of tech staff is driving the company forward amid the lightning pace of digital transformation, with a technology enthusiast in the business's driving seat.
The company, which is today a digital marketplace for buying and seling cars, published its last magazine in 2013. It is not drilling into the latest technologies to make sure S and life Easier for theirs.
CEO Nathan Coe is an itthusiast who started his career working in merges and acquisitions in the early 2000s when the internet was “really starting to kick off”.
“I've kind of been born and bred on the internet and in technology businesses,” He Tells Computer Weekly. “I was buying and selling companys, but building stuff is what I really like doing, so I pretty qiykly became involved in tech and ran product and tech at autotrader for years.”
Although Autotrader Had Its First Website in 1995, When Coe Began Working There in the Early 2000s, about 60% of its revionue was from its magazines. In 2007, Backed by Investors, The Company Decided to become a digital business. “We ended up doing that probally more aggressively than imagined,” Says Coe. It published its last magazine in 2013 to become a 100% digital business.
Transformation in stages
The digital transformation has been happed gradually. Over time, the company introduced a mobile business, a data business, and now offers platforms for other Organasations in its sector to run their businesses from.
Coe says all these developments togeether form the digital business. “It's not like things are sequential steps, they all still exist togethr. We are still a web business, stil a data business, still a mobile business, and we are still adding and augmenting, “He says.
Behind all these projects and plans sits a team of tech staff, which current accounts for a third of the organization's total workforce of 1,200. The Tech Team Compresses Engineers, Designers, Product Specialists and Data Scientists.
“For the past 10 years, we've been developing our data and data science capabilitys so that we're alive to provide highly scalable, highly performant, high-delivery recommendations on the recommendations on the recommendations
Nathan Coe, Autotrader
It's a demanding and dynamic work environment. Autotrader's website is visited by about 1.6 million people a day, who spend a combined 500 million minutes a month on it.
“These aren't glori stats,” says coe. “There are 30,000 retailers that use our platform, and on our website, we've got 440,000 or so cars, which-unlike products on most e-commerce sites-Change Every Day and ARENIQUE”
This is a challenge for it staff, who do more than 1,000 software releases every week, using agile techniques.
“We were early into agile, moving into it about 10 years ago. Now [we operate] Continuous delivery and continuous integration, “Says coe. “We've got a group of engineers that focus on the infrastructure. That means we can adapt our software, Develop our software, and deliver really quickly and reliable. And importantly, we can respond and make many small changes, which reduces the risk of release and increase the velocity of innovation. “
Collaborative culture
It is rare in this day and age for a company so reliaunch on technology not to use it outsourcing suppliers. But, according to coe, this is the very reason the company doesn Bollywood them.
“We're very, very Principled when it comes to our technology and the way we do it. One of that Principles is that if there is a technology, we want full-time autotrader staff work on it. They are people with our values and our values, people who have sty and are not just here for a project, “He says.
“We don't use any outsourcing providers at all. We have uk staff working in the office more than they are out of the office, in an in-face, highly collaborative environment. “
The Organization's Technology Team is based mainly in manchester, where about 750 of its 1,200 staff are based. It also has an office in London.
It recruitment at autotrader is heavily focused on Finding Staff in the Early Years of Their Caarers, Says Coe. “We pay very well, but we don't want to just say, 'We pay the most so come and work with autotrader', because the proposation is much bigger and better thana that,” He Says.
Platformization of Fragmented Industry
Autotrader also Wants Its Retail Customers And Other Partner Firms to Benefit from it Team's Output. It receives huge Volumes of Application Programming Interface (API) Requests from Organizations that Use its platform to run their business. These include garages, lenders, retailers and insurers.
Potentially, Autotrader's Biggest It Project, According to Coe, is Known as “Digital Retailing”, What offers Small Organizations in the Car Dealling Sector The Opportunity to access the late gh its platform.
“All the technology that we build to run autotrader, we now allows to use to run their business off,” Says coe.
He says this one of the company's “big goals” at the moment. “Now we're say, 'actually, you should be able to do more than a transaction on autotrader, a brand that you Trust'.”
Coe says many industry customers are small and do'T have big technology functions. This is not us taking interest in seling the cars, but allowing our retailers to get all the advantages of selling in an omnichannel way, “Adds coe.
Perfect Problem for Ai
While the company is finding answers for its customers, it is creating problems for artificial intelligence (AI) to solve.
Autotrader is currently engaged in multiple ai projects and, according to co, it is a good testing ground for the most discussed technology of today. He says having 440,000 cars on its site, which change frequent, is a “perfect problem for ai” to solve.
“Our products are all unique, so you need to decompes to decompe the data and rebuild up to, for example, value products and tell our sells how long they will go to sell,” Says O.
But he says while ai is now being talked about by everyone, from big businesses to schools, there are different variatiies, much of which is not business-readi. “I think it's important to rewind a little bit, because AI to people often means plugging ChatGPT into something to write an email, which we think is maybe interesting, but not a particularly intelligent use of AI. ,
Autotrader's it team is currently engaged in three separate projects that harness ai technology, but this is noting new to the company.
“For the past 10 years, we've been developing our data and data science capabilities so that we're alive to provide to provide highly scalable, highly performant, AI-Driven recommendations on the recommendations on the recommendations.”
“We've been using AI, mainly machine learning, for years, and we do that beCause all thees all the time vehicles are different and people want to know what the value is. Car deals want to understand what's on the cars, what makes them stand out and how quickly they can sell them. “