Singapore – Aiming to fuel the company’s continued expansion and growth, CARSOME Group has recently unveiled a multi-year partnership with Google Cloud and modern tech consulting firm Searce.
In this collaboration, the company will use Google Cloud’s expertise in infrastructure, cybersecurity, data analytics, and generative AI. It also aims to transform car transactions and ownership for consumers and used car dealers while also strengthening CARSOME’s role as Southeast Asia’s premier car e-commerce platform.
CARSOME will also leverage Searce’s technical consultancy and implementation expertise to embark on the shift to a unified cloud operating model.
Said move includes migrating the applications and databases that underpin CARSOME’s core operations and ancillary services to Google Cloud’s workload-optimised infrastructure for deeper integration and facilitating continuous software improvements using Google Cloud’s developer-friendly tools.
Furthermore, CARSOME’s move to Google Cloud will give its teams access to granular insights that enable improved business decision-making and hyper-personalized customer engagement.
This is made possible by the company’s first-party data residing in Google Cloud’s BigQuery, where it is integrated with Looker for business intelligence and Google Marketing Platform for data-driven marketing initiatives.
In addition, the native integrations between BigQuery and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform also enable CARSOME to centrally process and stream data in all formats to enhance the performance of its existing AI applications including proprietary pricing engine, photo analysis system, and a gen AI-powered contact center solution .
Kjetil Rohde Jakobsen, group chief technology officer at CARSOME Group, remarked, “At CARSOME, we’ve been digitizing the used car industry with the help of advanced technologies since 2015. With our business continuing to experience significant growth, we saw an opportunity to strengthen our digital foundation to better support our expanding operations and drive even greater efficiencies.”
“Shifting from a multicloud environment to Google Cloud not only helps us realize cost savings due to its infrastructure’s better price-performance; it also allows us to access secure-by-design, full stack capabilities across data analytics and AI. This will enable our teams to deliver more dynamic and differentiated solutions and experiences for CARSOME customers and partners across the region, from car listings and discovery, to financing and transacting, to after-sales support,” added Jakobsen.
Yash Thakker, director, solutions consulting of Asia Pacific at Searce, stated, “We’re proud to be facilitating CARSOME’s cloud consolidation, which will optimize its cloud spend by as much as 30%. These cost savings can then be redeployed toward other strategic innovation initiatives that deliver top-line growth for the business, such as the potential development of next-generation conversational AI agents that autonomously and effectively handle common customer queries for relevant information, freeing up CARSOME’s customer support staff to address more complex issues.”
He further noted, “With a full team of certified in-house experts, Searce is well-positioned to support companies’ full-scale infrastructure migration to Google Cloud and the technical implementation of cutting-edge Google Cloud AI solutions.”
Serene Sia, country director, Malaysia and Singapore at Google Cloud, also said, “By running its business on fully managed Google Cloud infrastructure that scales reliably to handle the increasing performance needs of any application, CARSOME can expand its operations with confidence, from increasing its penetration in existing markets, to expanding its inventory of pre-owned vehicles, to streamlining the movement of vehicles between inspection centers, refurbishment facilities, and customers.”
“Together with Searce, we look forward to completing CARSOME’s cloud consolidation and advancing its innovation roadmap, which includes harnessing gen AI and agentic AI to create more personalized and seamless car transaction and ownership experiences, delivering new engines of growth for its business,” Sia explained.
Interestingly, CARSOME is integrating semantic search within its internal tools using BigQuery and Vertex AI Agent Builder, enabling employees to seamlessly extract key insights from its vast enterprise knowledge base.
