Even the Mechanics Must Ship an AI Agent to Graduate at Kavak
When an agent gets stuck, a person talks it through, the software saves the lesson, and the next case goes alone.
Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career · Why companies are becoming a series of loops | Anish Acharya (a16z)When a sale gets complicated at Kavak, the Mexican company that sells used cars online, the call for help does not come from the customer. It comes from the software. Each customer has an AI agent, a piece of software that can do multi-step work on its own, and when that helper hits a problem it cannot solve, it calls a human to coach it through.
That reversal starts with training of a different kind. Anish Acharya, a partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, says Kavak runs what it calls a Jedi Academy to train its whole workforce, mechanics included, in new AI tools. After six weeks, each student ships an agent that runs in real operations.
The point is bigger than one company. Acharya argues that outsiders underestimate ordinary employees, caricaturing office workers as paper shufflers and customers as passive. Kavak is his counterexample, where people who were hired to inspect, fix, or sell cars are expected to put working automation into production.
Here the coaching runs the other way. Ale, who works at Kavak and who Acharya describes as a sophisticated thinker on AI, described the setup: there is an agent for each customer. When that helper hits a problem it cannot solve, it calls a person, and the person talks it through the problem.
The value is not only that the person unblocks that sale. The agent saves the step-by-step record of what the person knew and did, the trace, and learns from it. In Acharya's way of thinking about it, the fix is one of two things. Either the agent was missing knowledge, or it was missing data. Once it gets what it needs, Acharya said, "the next time, it shouldn't have to call you."
A mechanic finishes the course by putting an agent into service, and the agent finishes its lesson by handling that same problem on its own the next time. The person is then free for the next problem the agent cannot yet solve.
Questions people ask
What exactly does Kavak do?
Kavak buys, refurbishes, and sells used cars, mostly online, and operates in Mexico and other Latin American markets. It handles pricing, financing, and delivery, which creates many routine customer questions that software can help answer.
What is an AI agent, and how is it different from a chatbot?
An AI agent is software that can take a goal and work through several steps, using tools like search, email, or databases. A chatbot mainly answers one question at a time, while an agent can check records, take actions, and ask a person for help when it is uncertain.
How does an agent actually learn from being coached?
A trace is a detailed log of what the agent saw and did, plus what the human coach told it. Engineers can turn that record into examples, instructions, or additional data connections, so the agent handles the same situation correctly in the future.