A hands-on experiment to test whether AI shopping assistants threaten property and car listing sites ended in their favour.
Giles Thorne, an internet analyst at Jefferies, the investment bank, built his own artificial intelligence agent to search for a house and a car this summer.
He wanted to test a growing fear among investors: that AI agents could make websites like Rightmove PLC (LSE:RMV) and Auto Trader Group PLC (LSE:AUTO) redundant.
The theory holds that people will soon ask an AI assistant to search for cars and houses on their behalf, cutting out the classified advertising platforms entirely.
Lobster roll-up
Thorne set up his agent using OpenClaw, a free, open-source AI tool that can carry out tasks through apps such as WhatsApp.
He named it Devenish, after his own middle name, and gave it a fictional profile: a father of three looking for a four-bedroom house and a family car.
The first attempt failed badly, as Thorne could not get OpenClaw to connect properly with email and messaging tools.
He eventually switched to Zapia, a downloadable AI assistant, which took just ten minutes to do what OpenClaw had failed to manage in three weeks.
Once running, Devenish sent Thorne property and car listings over two months, from 2 July to 31 August.
Agent misfires
But the agent relied overwhelmingly on the same platforms it was supposed to be disrupting.
Devenish pulled 57% of its property links from Rightmove and only 1% directly from estate agents, because agent websites had data that was too inconsistent for the agent to use reliably.
Rightmove itself sent far more alerts than Devenish managed, 347 compared with 205, and did so in real time.
The picture was worse for cars: Autotrader never sent Thorne a single alert during the entire test, yet Devenish still pulled 45% of its car links from the same platform.
Both Rightmove and Autotrader also offered richer tools than Devenish could match, including mortgage calculators, renovation estimates and vehicle price comparisons.
Devenish's weaknesses went beyond content, too, as its WhatsApp connection broke unexpectedly when Thorne tried to arrange a car test drive.
Sites and builders
Thorne concluded that platforms such as Rightmove and Autotrader are best placed to build their own AI tools, rather than being replaced by outside agents.
He noted that Rightmove and Autotrader are free to use, whereas maintaining his own agent cost him around £20 a month in subscriptions.
Both companies are reportedly planning to launch their own agentic AI services for users in the near future.
Thorne's report follows a similar experiment he ran in 2019, when he worked as a Deliveroo rider to test the economics of food delivery apps.
He has now dismantled Devenish entirely, cancelling the mobile contract and putting the Raspberry Pi computer that hosted the agent up for sale.
The findings feed into a separate note published by Jefferies the same day, arguing that AI agents will ultimately strengthen rather than weaken online classified platforms.
