Cars24, India’s leading ai-native automotive ecosystem has announced one of the biggest organisational changes in its history. Effective immediately, the company has eliminated traditional levels, grades and job titles across the organisation, replacing them with a new operating philosophy called Flatland. With the move, Cars24 becomes one of the few technology companies globally to dismantle conventional corporate hierarchy at scale.
Flatland goes far beyond removing titles. It is a complete redesign of how the company makes decisions, earns authority, evolves careers and gets work done. People are no longer defined by organisational rank, but by the problems they own and the outcomes they create. Every one of the company’s people now shares a single identity: Builder.
The change is rooted in a conviction that AI has rewritten the economics of organisations. For over a century, hierarchy solved one problem: information scarcity. The people at the top had the greatest context, so decisions travelled upward before coming back down. When intelligence, context and expertise become available to everyone, the value of an organisation shifts from distributing information to coordinating exceptional people solving exceptional problems together. Cars24 believes the companies shaping the AI era cannot keep running on models designed for the industrial one.
“Hierarchy was one of humanity’s greatest inventions,” said Vikram Chopra, Builder at Cars24. “It helped organisations scale when information was scarce. AI fundamentally changes that equation. Today, intelligence and context are increasingly available to everyone. The role of an organisation is no longer to move decisions up and down layers. It’s to help exceptional people solve exceptional problems together. Flatland is our attempt to build an organisation for that reality.”
“Every generation gets to question one assumption that previous generations took for granted,” he added. “Ours may be the assumption that companies need to be organised the way they have been for the last hundred years. We don’t claim to have the final answer. But we believe that question is now worth asking and worth building around.”
Under Flatland, leadership is a function of judgment, execution and customer impact rather than position. The best ideas no longer have to climb a hierarchy before they create value; whether an idea comes from a founder or a new joiner, it is evaluated on its merit.
This new centred design is already changing how the business operates. Over the past 18 months, Cars24 has rebuilt the way work gets done, resulting in a 50% year-on-year increase in revenue per employee in H2 FY26 while contributing nearly 300 basis points to EBITDA, without a proportional increase in operating costs. Today, the company operates across India, the UAE and Australia, serves more than 41 million monthly active users, and turned globally profitable this year.
Cars24 has redesigned its people systems from the ground up to remove hierarchy wherever it served only as administrative signalling. Bands and grades have been dissolved, and policies governing benefits, travel, reimbursements and IT assets are no longer linked to rank, they now rest on objective factors such as role requirements, compensation where appropriate, and universal employee benefits. New joiners no longer enter a grade or level; they join Cars24 as Builders.
Flatland does not remove accountability. Every employee still has clearly defined responsibilities, performance expectations and decision rights. What changes is the source of authority: it comes from ownership, not position. The transition has been rolled out in phases over the past several months, beginning with senior leadership before expanding across the organisation, with decision-making, feedback and recognition systems all redesigned to support the new model.
“We don’t believe removing titles automatically creates a great culture,” Chopra said. “Culture comes from behaviour. Flatland simply removes the shortcuts that let people mistake position for contribution. We want the person closest to the problem to feel empowered to solve it regardless of where they joined or how long they’ve been here.”
Over the past decade, Cars24 has evolved from a used-car marketplace into one of the world’s largest AI-native automotive ecosystems, spanning discovery, financing, servicing and ownership. The company believes that as AI reshapes industries, the organisations that endure will not simply adopt AI into existing structures, they will redesign themselves around it. Flatland is Cars24’s first step in building that future.
