The AI Reality Check
250 roadshows a month and no AI chatbots
Andrew Wood founded WeBuyVintage in Leeds to make antiques and jewellery buying feel less fragmented and more direct. The business now runs 250+ roadshows a month across the UK, with face-to-face assessments designed to replace the usual postal or fully digital process.
AI is useful at WeBuyVintage for internal admin, research and drafting, but not for the parts of the business where trust and judgement matter most. Customer conversations stay human, and even automation experiments have been rolled back when they created more problems than they solved.
What’s the quick origin story of your brand, and what makes your product or positioning genuinely different from other options in your niche?
Andrew Wood founded WeBuyVintage in Leeds after seeing how fragmented and impersonal the traditional antiques and jewellery-buying market could be. Rather than relying on postal services or purely digital marketplaces, WeBuyVintage built around face-to-face buying and now operates 250+ roadshows a month across the UK. The difference is trust: customers can sit across from a real person, understand what they own and make a decision there and then.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
Today, new business comes through a mix of local roadshow marketing, digital discovery, referrals and repeat customers. Andrew would like an increasing share to come organically from people already understanding and trusting the WeBuyVintage brand before they ever attend a roadshow.
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
Andrew uses AI to help streamline internal processes and support the development of new tools and systems, but anything involving code or business-critical infrastructure is still reviewed and secured by developers before it goes live. Safety and reliability come first.
They have also found that some attempts to automate operational processes created more problems than they solved, so parts of the business have deliberately gone back to more human-led ways of working. Customer communication is one area Andrew has never wanted to hand over to AI: WeBuyVintage has avoided AI chatbots and automated conversations because human interaction and trust are fundamental to the service.
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
Customers increasingly arrive having already researched the company, checked reviews and looked into what their items might be worth before speaking to a buyer. Buyers are also noticing that sellers are becoming much more informed, which can make conversations smoother and help people better understand the value of what they own. The downside is that AI can sometimes give people inaccurate valuations or information, which means the human interaction is still important for correcting expectations and properly assessing an item.
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Andrew would tell businesses to use AI aggressively where it removes low-value repetitive work, while protecting the parts of the customer journey where trust, expertise and judgement create real value. The question should not be whether AI can replace a person, but whether it genuinely improves the work or customer experience.
He believes AI can be incredibly useful for document creation, summarising information, research and repetitive admin, particularly where it gives people more time for higher-value work. But human interpretation still matters. People should understand where information has come from, challenge it, add their own judgement and use AI as a starting point rather than outsourcing every decision to it.
The goal should be to make people better at their jobs, not remove the thinking that makes their work valuable in the first place.
Thank you to Andrew Wood and the team at WeBuyVintage for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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