It’s rare these days that a prospec­tive car buy­er would wan­der onto a car lot with­out first look­ing on the web to find infor­ma­tion on mod­els and fea­tures. Either by acci­dent or inten­tion, that buy­er may find their self at Edmunds​.com. Edmunds began as a com­pa­ny that print­ed a series of infor­ma­tion­al books on cars but now pri­mar­i­ly lives online as not only an infor­ma­tion­al resource, but an inven­to­ry tool that con­nects buy­ers and sellers. 

The val­ue propo­si­tion for Edmunds on the con­sumer side is pro­vid­ing the right infor­ma­tion for a car buy­er, poten­tial­ly guid­ing them to a deci­sion on the make and mod­el they want, then pro­vid­ing a link to a sell­er that is offer­ing that prod­uct. Machine learn­ing helps in this case by pro­vid­ing a per­son­al expe­ri­ence, show­ing a cus­tomer only the infor­ma­tion they want or need to know. 

Machine Learn­ing to Bet­ter Adver­tise Vehicles

Where Edmunds is real­ly seek­ing out val­ue from machine learn­ing is on the deal­er and man­u­fac­tur­er side. For exam­ple, that val­ue comes from pro­vid­ing ways for deal­ers and man­u­fac­tur­ers to bet­ter show their prod­ucts. Edmunds is doing that through a machine-learn­ing dri­ven tool that can iden­ti­fy the best angles in pho­tos of cars to ensure the pic­tures are most appeal­ing to con­sumers, based on analy­sis of past cus­tomer behavior.